Using and abusing the memory of Jackie Robinson

There is no man in baseball more honorable than Jackie Robinson, and there’s no use of a particular player that makes me more uncomfortable. Jackie Robinson is too good for baseball.

Today, April 15, marks the fifty-ninth anniversary of Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color barrier. With an on-field aggression overshadowed only by his remarkable forebearance, Robinson could have been said to be a martyr—if he had played a day and gone away. But he played well. He joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 in his prime, at age 28, and earned Rookie of the Year. He was MVP and batting champion in 1949. He led the Dodgers to six pennants. He batted .311 for his career. And, for good measure, he stole home 19 times, a mark since unsurpassed.

But for one confrontation with a bigotted umpire, Jackie Robinson resisted racism with necessary poise. During World War II, he fought in a segregated battalion. He was denied entry at first to officers training but persevered and gained admittance. A decade before Rosa Parks’ resistance, Robinson refused to sit at the back of a Texas bus and was nearly discharged from the Army for insubordination. He took the kind of abuse that Americans pretended was buried at Antietam and Gettysburg, and he took it with grace. He is exactly the kind of man Major League Baseball should hold up, should shine full light upon so that generations of young Americans can see that character triumphs over prejudice.

But the size of Jackie Robinson’s character is such that baseball can, and does, hide behind it. It wasn’t some abstract national weakness that kept blacks out of baseball for fifty seven years. It was an agreement of team owners, who, fearful of the advantage any one team would have by hiring black talent, plotted against, and repeatedly thwarted, the entrance of any Negro Leaguer. Bold but self-interested owner Branch Rickey had to lie to his own scouts working the Negro League teams, had to tell the scouts that he was forming his own blacks-only league, just to get a look at Robinson without arousing supsicion.

Baseball forgets this.

In the pre-game canned-elegy today at Fenway Park, Robinson was remembered as someone who struck down racism, all racism, just by stepping on the field. “He opened doors for countless players after him” was a repeated line. True enough. Hall of Famers like Roy Campenella soon joined the Majors and thrived.

But many other doors remained closed. It would be twenty-seven years before baseball hired its first black manager; ironically, Jackie Robinson, who died before Frank Robinson was hired to manage the Cleveland Indians in 1974, desperately wanted to manage but was denied the opportunity. The Cincinatti Reds—baseball’s oldest team—waited until opening day 1954 to field its first black players, Chuck Harmon and Nino Escalera. And this year, in a league of thirty teams, there is only one black general manager, Ken Williams of the defending champion Chicago White Sox.

Major League Baseball prides itself on its appeal across cultures, and the recent MLB-sponsored World Baseball Classic bears this out. But baseball returns to its fight against white/black racism and returns to Jackie Robinson in 1947 and fetes the victories—all while diverting attention from contemporary failures of equal stature.

Americans sports in general have a terrible record when it comes to acknowledging the existence of homosexuality, for example. Only two baseball players—Billy Bean and Glenn Burke, who died of AIDS in 1995—have ever gone public with their homosexuality. I should say, I don’t feel publicly-fought social battles over sex and sexuality have a place in sports. But for baseball to hold itself up as the stage upon which social advancements play out—it’s nothing if not disingenuous.

And there is the issue of the day: steroids. The owners knew. The managers knew. The players knew. While Jackie Robinson played in an unadulterated era, one in which the only available chemicals were the kind that gave you hangovers, for the last ten years, as fans celebrated the retirement of Robinson’s number 42, players were lying to fans, lying to their employers (who knew anyway, and then lied to the fans with their silence), and encouraging each other to cheat as well.

Baseball didn’t have clear rules against steroids. It had no testing policy, in fact, until the BALCO story broke. So player and fan reactions are necessarily complicated: we as fans paid to see home runs, the thought goes, and the players delivered, using means that weren’t proscribed.

But the steroids issue is why Robinson’s memory is so dangerous.

If baseball held up as its idols only players like Ruth and Mantle—let alone talented thugs like Cobb and Rose—then what would steroids matter? It would be another chip in the bargain. We pay; they entertain. But Robinson is so flawless, so admirable, and so exalted by the game that the game obliges itself to be exalted too. To be above pettiness. To be above greed. To act with honor, as Robinson did.

To love what Jackie Robinson did is to believe in a game that does represent our national character. As such, owners and players are our trustees. A game marred by those trustees in persistent racism, intolerance, and, now through steroids, dishonesty—this is an afront to the memory we honor this day.

April 15, 2006, was the first Jackie Robinson Day, and it was marked at all fifteen stadiums with an idealized picture of baseball and its role in America. Every April 15, then, baseball should do the same, but not with a picture—with a mirror.