Throughout the spring, his main relief from the sweat and strain of the hot days and the boredom and emptiness of the evenings and nights was the thought of his home in Connecticut, and especially Rachel there. In his letters, Jack’s yearning for her had an unmistakably plaintive edge. “My Darling, I can’t tell you how much talking with you eases my loneliness,” he wrote once.
It is so nice hearing your voice as it makes me feel you are closer to me and I don’t feel so bad as I did before talking with you. I can hardly wait to be near you so I can hold you in my arms and love you like I have been wanting to do all the time I have been away. When you told me you were snowed in I [en]visioned our being together and loving each other as we so often do. I could feel your warmth and my darling I need to love and caress you tenderly as I have really missed being away. My only solution to this point has been my desire to get into as good a condition as possible and to try not to think too much about being away. It has worked to a certain extent but I miss you too much not to think about [you] every day all day.…
The 1956 season, Robinson’s last, was both another triumph (Brooklyn’s sixth pennant in his ten years with the team) and a sometimes somber, even depressing experience that hastened his departure from the game.
Hovering over the season was the specter of the demise of major-league baseball in Brooklyn. In 1950, Walter O’Malley had faced squarely the reality that Ebbets Field was, on the one hand, charming and saturated with nostalgia and, on the other, cramped, obsolete, and decrepit. The Dodgers were both the most lucrative franchise in the majors and the most threatened, as the repopulation of the borough by new immigrant communities was changing the peculiar culture that had long nourished the team. Shrewd and imaginative, O’Malley also faced political leaders and officials unwilling or unable to face either these facts or his own steely determination to do what he thought was best for himself and his family. “My father didn’t want to leave Brooklyn,” Peter O’Malley, who would succeed his father as president in 1970, said. “He wanted to build a ballpark in Brooklyn. He had a site, Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, that he believed in. But he was not allowed to do it.” In 1952, at Walter O’Malley’s behest, the architect Norman Bel Geddes designed a domed stadium for the site. After that idea was met with general ridicule, the Dodgers president sold Ebbets Field to a real-estate developer, who then leased the ballpark back to the Dodgers on a five-year contract. In 1955, another O’Malley plan for a domed stadium, to be designed by the architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller, also elicited mainly scorn. In August of that year, the Dodgers announced that the team would play twenty “home” games, over a three-year period, in vacant Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City.
When the Dodgers opened their season on April 19, 1956, at Roosevelt Stadium, Robinson had come full circle; this was the scene of his grand debut as a Montreal Royal almost exactly ten years before. Then, on a sunny day in 1946, before an overflowing park, he had exploded the myth of Negro physical and mental inferiority in baseball. But this circle was not a harmony. Whereas more than twenty-five thousand people had watched that game in 1946, now only twelve thousand fans paid to view the opener in 1956, although the Dodgers were world champions. In 1946, the crowd had been respectful as it watched a black man, against the odds, break the color line; now, in 1956, many fans were openly hostile to Robinson although he was nominally playing at “home.”
Stirring their anger were reports that Robinson had called Jersey City unworthy of a major-league team even on an interim basis; a fielding error charged to him only intensified the booing. He was clearly hurt and mystified by the response. “The way they acted,” he said angrily about his error and the fans, “you’d think I did it on purpose.” Pressed by reporters to explain his remark about Jersey City, Robinson grew more and more testy. Then, when Ed Brennan, a reporter with the local Jersey Journal, asked fatuously why he could not act like a gentleman, Jack exploded. A Dodger publicity man stopped him, allegedly, from going after Brennan. But Robinson’s remarks about Jersey City had also angered his general manager. “Robinson doesn’t have to worry about playing in Jersey City three more years,” Bavasi snapped. “With the kind of playing he’s been doing recently, he had better worry about the next three months.”
The hostile reaction of Jersey City fans continued. A local bar owner, Jimmy Gallagher, explained that the town had been a Giants stronghold for thirteen years; besides, Robinson, great ballplayer that he was, “seems to have a gift for getting people riled up.” Another factor, difficult to gauge, was perhaps the ethnic composition of the Jersey City audience, which probably included a far smaller percentage of Jews and blacks, Jack’s most loyal supporters, than in Brooklyn. In any event, “it’s the fans’ privilege to boo,” he conceded wearily to a writer. “I’m here to play ball, and if they want to come to the ball park to boo, that’s their business. No ball player likes to be booed, but I’d be foolish to let it bother me.”
On April 25, for the nineteenth and last time in a regular season in the majors, Jack stole home, against the Giants at the Polo Grounds. By mid-June, however, kept out by Alston in favor of Randy Jackson, he rode the bench and brooded on the dilemma he had become: Alston would not play him unless he looked sharp, but—especially at his age, thirty-seven—he could not be sharp unless he played consistently. Dangerously, he now and then flashed his rage against Alston for others to see. “I don’t think the Dodgers would keep me at the salary they’re paying me if they intended me to ride the bench,” he told a reporter (a curious echo of an approach he had condemned when Dick Young expressed it). But more often he kept busy and hoped to catch Alston’s eye. “I like Jack’s attitude,” Alston commented to the press. “He’s been working hard, keeping in shape and I like the way he peps up the bench.”
Sulking and silence were not Jack’s way; by instinct, he remained a peppery, driving presence on the club even when he rode the bench. In July, he clashed once again with Warren Giles, the league president. Behind this new dispute was an incident in a game against Cincinnati, when Robinson and the umpire Augie Donatelli disagreed on a call. At bat, Robinson claimed he had foul-tipped a ball onto his toe; Donatelli ruled the ball fair (with Robinson thrown out at first base). When Jack threw down his batting helmet in disgust, Donatelli ejected him from the game. Later, to Jack’s astonishment, Giles fined Robinson fifty dollars for making unspecified “remarks.” Robinson was furious. “I’m fined for remarks?” he asked. “What remarks? I didn’t swear. I didn’t curse, except for maybe ‘damn.’ … If Donatelli says I swore he’s a liar, but I don’t think he did.” To Jack, and some other observers, the fine was out of line; Billy Bruton of the Braves, for example, was fined the same amount for the far more serious offense of fighting with another player.
Unquestionably, racism played a role in such incidents; no supporter of racial integration or black players, Giles and many baseball administrators quietly detested a defiant Negro like Jack and sought ways to squash him. Jack, on the other hand, also brought to the ballpark in the summer of 1956 something that should have been irrelevant but was inescapable for a black man struggling in a white-dominated milieu: a keen awareness of the epidemic of violence aimed at blacks and white liberals in the South because of the civil rights movement. In communities across the South, blacks following the lead of Dr. King and his Montgomery bus boycott were arrested and jailed by local police, or subject to other random acts of brutality by whites. While some school districts complied with the Supreme Court ruling of 1954 on integration, in many places white mobs barred an end to Jim Crow. After Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called for “massive resistance” to integration, more than one hundred Southern congressmen signed a manifesto supporting segregated schools, even as the reactionary White Citizens Councils reached a membership of over three hundred thousand persons. Autherine Lucy, a young black woman, was admitted to the University of Alabama by court decree, but removed in the face of white rioting and then expelled when she sued to be
readmitted. In Birmingham, Alabama, the respected singer and pianist Nat “King” Cole was attacked on stage by a group of whites.
Cole’s treatment in Birmingham, as well as other episodes in the intensifying civil rights struggle, was discussed in the Dodger dugout, where Robinson could count on players such as Reese, Labine, Hodges, and Erskine for sympathy. Other players were not always as understanding, even if they, too, struggled to preserve team unity. Beyond the team, Jack was often a visible target for whites venting their anger against blacks, as the nation underwent changes that had been unthinkable only a few years before. In July, one personal attack on Robinson, appearing first in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, expressed the rage felt by many whites against him as the symbol of the social and political changes that had overtaken America since World War II. Immediately behind the attack were two factors. The first was an essay by Jack, “The South After Ten Years in the Majors,” commissioned by the Pittsburgh Courier and carried soon after in the Sporting News. The second factor was a new Louisiana law, approved unanimously by the legislature, that banned interracial sport.
In his article on the South, Jack was relatively mild. Essentially he found the South a paradox. Integration was growing, but racial tension was becoming worse. Many Southern whites were his friends, but in the South he still felt the raw force of white resentment. (Don Drysdale would recall a visit that year to Pelican Stadium in New Orleans, when the seats were close to the players “and Jackie got an earful. The fans called him the worst possible names, and about the most polite thing I heard was ‘Gator Bait.’ It was brutal, and I was always braced for an incident of some sort.”) Jack wrote about the segregated hotels, but also about signs of progress, especially in Miami. Blacks were often intimidated, but some were standing up for their rights. In Mobile, Alabama, for example, he had seen “quite a bit of tension because of the Supreme Court decision. But in other cities I noticed Negroes helping in the fight.”
Robinson’s sense of balance got him nowhere with the Times-Picayune columnist, Bill Keefe, who both backed the new Jim Crow sports law and blamed it on Robinson, that “persistently insolent and trouble-making Negro of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Robinson had been “pampered and humored” by baseball officials until he thought he was “immune to discipline.” Ending Jim Crow would bankrupt most hotels, Keefe wrote, because whites would stay away from them. “Sincere segregationists therefore should chip in and buy a plaque to present Robinson for his yeoman work.”
Keefe’s attack, which he subtitled “Enemy of His Race,” hurt Jack deeply and drew from him one of the most incisive letters he had ever written. Scribbling a draft, ironically, on stationery of the once-segregationist Chase Hotel in St. Louis, he addressed Keefe “not as Jackie Robinson, but as one human being to another.” Far from being a troublemaker, he was rather “an American who happens to be an American Negro and one who is proud of that heritage.” Writing on behalf of black Americans, Jack insisted that “we ask for nothing special. We ask only that we be permitted to live as you live, and as our nation’s constitution provides.” Concerning segregated hotels, black ballplayers now stayed in “white” hotels in cities such as St. Louis and Cincinnati without these hotels losing trade, much less going out of business. “I wish you could see this as I do,” he told Keefe, “but I hold little hope. I wish you could comprehend how unfair and un-American it is for the accident of birth to make such a difference to you.”
As for being insolent, “I’ll admit I have not been subservient, but would you use the same adjective to describe a white ball player—say Ted Williams, who is, more often than I, involved in controversial matters? Am I insolent, or am I merely insolent for a Negro (who has courage enough to speak against injustices such as yours and people like you)?” “I am happy for you, that you were born white,” Robinson concluded. “It would have been extremely difficult for you had it been otherwise.” (On August 7, for the third time in three weeks, Williams openly spat at fans at Fenway Park, some of whom had booed and insulted him. His club fined him $5,000, which he never paid, according to a Boston newspaper. The following month the state legislature itself acted: it approved a bill that would fine fans for using profanity.)
On the baseball field, when Jack’s resentment of racism touched the pennant race, the potential for an explosion only increased. In Milwaukee, for example, as the Dodgers strove to catch the league-leading Braves, he came close to making one of the worst mistakes of his career. After he became convinced that Lew Burdette was aiming thinly disguised racial insults at him, Jack simmered and stewed and then retaliated with uncharacteristic violence. In the middle of a warmup session in the infield, he suddenly wheeled and fired the ball at Burdette, who was standing on the Braves’ dugout steps. Barely missing Burdette’s head, the baseball crashed into a wall behind him and rebounded onto the field. Astonished reporters found Robinson trembling with anger. Why had he thrown the ball at Burdette? “I threw it at him because I wanted to hit him right between the eyes,” he responded. “He was calling me names, and I won’t stand for that.” Burdette had black teammates about whom he obviously cared little, and who were too intimidated or confused to stand up to him. “How do you think they felt?” he said. “I decided I’d have to say what [Henry] Aaron and [Bill] Bruton—a couple [of] kids—wouldn’t say back to him.… He’s nothing but a coward in my book.” (When Burdette denied the remarks were racist, Robinson responded the way he normally did in such a case: he accepted the denial and ended the feud.)
Far more often, Jack channeled his anger into his play, or set his anger aside completely, in an act of will, as he concentrated on the task at hand. Early in August, when Alston returned him to the lineup against the front-running Braves after a spell in limbo, Jack responded with a two-run homer in the second inning, then won the game in the ninth with a long single to beat Milwaukee by one run. He continued to play an important role through September, as the Dodgers bore down in the home stretch on the faltering Braves. Leading the Brooklyn charge were Newcombe and the former Giants headhunter Sal Maglie, now a Dodger. Newcombe would finish with 27 wins for the finest season of his career (he was named MVP of the league). Maglie, acquired from the Indians in May to replace Podres, won 13 games himself. Although diminished compared to 1954 and 1955, Dodger hitting power was still formidable: Snider, about whom Jack had fretted in the spring, hit 43 home runs. On September 25, Maglie threw a no-hitter against the Phillies at Ebbets Field to keep the Dodgers only a half-game behind the Braves. Four days later, Brooklyn moved ahead of Milwaukee by one game with one game to go. On the last day of the season, the Dodgers won the pennant.
Robinson’s inspired play down the stretch led Bill Corum in the New York Journal-American to salute him as “a one-man task force of the diamond,” who was “still the most dangerous individual competitor in the game.” In the World Series, once more against the Yankees, Jack played in all seven games and hit .250, with one home run and one game-winning hit. The Dodgers shone in the first two games at home, then dropped the next three in Yankee Stadium. The last game there, on October 8, saw Don Larsen, a physically imposing but hitherto mediocre pitcher, retire twenty-seven batters in a row to hurl a perfect game and defeat Maglie and the Dodgers, 2–0. (After the game, Jack called on Larsen to pay his respects.) Back at Ebbets Field, pitching dominated again, with both teams scoreless after nine innings. Then, in the tenth inning, when an aging Enos Slaughter misplayed Robinson’s line drive to left field, Gilliam scored to give Brooklyn the win and tie the series; Jack’s welcome in the Dodgers’ dugout almost matched that accorded Larsen after his famous victory. But in the seventh and deciding game, the Dodger ace, Newcombe, lost in a rout.
By most accountings, Robinson had enjoyed a highly creditable series, to finish off a season that marked an improvement in many respects over 1955. Playing 12 more games (117), he had batted .275 (up from .256), with 43 runs batted in (instead of 36), 61 runs scored (up from 51), and 12 stolen bases (the same as 1955
). His 10 home runs (up from 8) and 15 doubles (up from 6) helped to raise his slugging percentage to .412 (from .363 the previous year). Based on this performance (and his financial needs), he had little difficulty in deciding that he would play at least one more season in the majors.
But he would do so only reluctantly. His body clearly was not responding as it once did to exercise; now, despite stringent dieting, he gained weight routinely even during the season. His knees and ankles chronically hurt; his throwing arm often cried out for rest. Quite apart from the demands of his body was his urge to end his prolonged absences from Rachel and the children. Now, more than ever, Jack hoped for the chance in business that would allow him to move on to the next major phase of his life. But his own business ventures were only a mixed success, at best. On 125th Street in Harlem, his clothing store was barely alive. Thus far, his venture into housing construction had led nowhere, with no buildings erected—although in 1956 he was still using his name to open doors for his partners. Over the summer, a news item suggested breathlessly that he and a syndicate of investors were about to buy several radio stations in the South; but this deal, if it ever existed, fell through.
About managing in baseball, Jack was ambivalent, mainly because he wanted to be close to home in the future. His best chance, in any event, was a position outside the United States, where racism would be less of a factor. In Canada, Sam Bankhead, a brother of Dan Bankhead, the first black pitcher in the majors (with the Dodgers), had once managed at Drummondville in the Provincial League. To Jack, Montreal was ideal, if in the minor leagues; but the Royals job was not likely to be open to him, given his relationship with Walter O’Malley. (“Robinson can’t manage himself,” O’Malley once snapped, no doubt after Jack left baseball. “How can you expect him to manage twenty-five ball-players?”) Earlier in 1956, talk was that Robinson would be offered the chance to manage the new Vancouver club, transferred from Oakland, California, in the Pacific Coast League; but the talk led nowhere. In October, another report again linked Robinson to the Montreal Royals. To an inquiring reporter, Jack confirmed that the offer was “strictly rumor”; however, “I’d like to manage a ball club. I’m thirty-seven years old now, and I’ve got a lot of gray hair.”
Jackie Robinson Page 43