Jackie Robinson and Baseball’s Great Reckoning

‘A League of His Own: A. G. Spalding and the Business of Baseball’By Mark A. SteinLyons Press, 352 pages‘Integration at Second Base: Jackie Robinson and the Quest for Black Citizenship’By Peter EisenstadtUniversity of Virginia Press, 344 pagesA. G. Spalding (1850-1915), the founder of the world’s greatest sporting goods empire, a Gilded Age monopolist who wiped out his competition, was also a moralist who attacked alcohol and gambling. He started out as a star pitcher and innovator who, as the first prominent player to wear a fielder’s glove, helped make it standard equipment. He also found time for a mistress on the side and for championing the U.S. Olympic movementThis authoritative biography contains exactly one paragraph about blacks in baseball:“Despite his authority over pro ball at all levels, Spalding was silent about the color line that excluded Black players from the major leagues. While a semipro league adopted the first explicit ban of Black players in 1867, when Spalding was still a schoolboy, there is no evidence that he resisted discrimination after becoming the most powerful man in pro ball. As the largest stockholder of the Chicago White Stockings, he did nothing to rein in the truculent racism of Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson, his team’s manager for 18 seasons, a Hall of Fame member, and arguably the most visible advocate of the color line. Instead, he appeared to be more interested in avoiding any issue that might hurt his club’s revenue.”Thirty years after Spalding died, Branch Rickey, General Manager and President of the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson as the first black player in the major leagues. Much had changed since Spalding’s era and much had not. Rickey grew up in a segregated society, showed no signs of becoming a liberal reformer, and voted Republican and opposed FDR’s New Deal. Initially Rickey had not wanted to move from St. Louis to New York City, yet, like Spalding, Rickey was an opportunist and unlike Spalding, he lived during a world war that was beginning to change the cultural climate for black people.Chapter Five of “Integration at Second Base” provides a nuanced explanation of why it had to be Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey who revolutionized modern baseball. Rickey a devout Methodist who idolized Abraham Lincoln, wanted to portray himself as a groundbreaking leader — not a radical but an inside baseball man who got to work on baseball owners and stockholders to show why it was in their interest to no longer take the approach that had proven so successful for Spalding.In effect, Rickey argued that the mounting pressures for integration had to be addressed, especially since white major league owners had been ignoring for generations the tremendous talent of black players. But Rickey understood he had to find the right black player to break the color line. Feisty Jackie Robinson did not necessarily fit the Rickey requirements. Robinson, by his own account, would not have made a good nonviolent Martin Luther King supporter. Robinson wanted to fight back and to prove his abilities in every field of play.Peter Eisenstadt presents that first meeting between Robinson and Rickey with great subtlety. I especially admire those moments when he cannot tell us what was going through Rickey’s mind — that is, how much he was acting as an opportunist and how much he was guided by his moral and religious principles. What Rickey had to essentially prove, in essence, was that signing Robinson would be good for business, although he did not let on to Robinson that this was so.Rickey offended Robinson by asking him about his personal life and if he had a girlfriend. But soon it became clear to Robinson that Rickey wanted to know what kind of support system Robinson could count on. In short, Rickey wanted to make sure that those closest to Robinson were supporting him, which meant, Rickey explained, that the most courageous thing Robinson could do was control and funnel his anger into his performances as a ball player.Both Spalding and Rickey were good businessmen closely attentive to the bottom line. But that did not mean, as Rickey showed, always observing the status quo, and that to innovate was not always a matter of producing better sports equipment but rather the better management of the people that needed to be included in order to grow that business.Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘American Biography.‘

Jackie Robinson and Baseball’s Great Reckoning

Jackie Robinson and Baseball’s Great Reckoning

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