baseball Archives - Not Even Past

“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library

The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to protest the police brutality against Eric Garner. In the summer of 2016, the WNBA joined the conversation with the “Change Starts with Us—Justice & Accountability” and #BlackLivesMatter, #Dallas5, #__ demonstrations by the Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty. The current moment is most defined, of course, by Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests that began in the 2016 NFL preseason. “Get in the Game” charts a legacy of barrier-breaking and justice-seeking athletes from the late 19^th century to the present with an emphasis on the current relationship between athlete activism and American politics.

Colin Kaepernick at the LBJ Library, (*all pictures unless otherwise noted are by the author*).

The exhibit is remarkably comprehensive, especially for a small-scale and brief installation (the exhibit closes January 13, 2019). Visitors will find a wide selection of sports represented—horse racing, football, baseball, basketball, track and field, boxing, tennis, golf, and fencing—and attention to gender, race, media, player salaries, and social justice. Guests should be keen to linger in the center room of the exhibition, where curatorial care and intentionality is reflected in an exceedingly well communicated examination of Jackie Robinson’s post-baseball activism and the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Letter from Jacki Robinson to President Johnson (photos by the author, materials held at the LBJ Library)

While most Americans are familiar with Jackie Robinson as a figure and the brief details of his early career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, few popular versions of his story reflect on the later years of his baseball career and after he retired. It is not popularly discussed that Robinson was among the crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, nor that he campaigned for Richard Nixon.

Robinson committed much of his time in retirement to activism, working with the NAACP, encouraging other black athletes, and communicating with several politicians. “Get in the Game” features letters and telegrams from Robinson to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The letters show Robinson’s concern that Civil Rights remain a presidential priority throughout changes in regimes, as well as his concerns about the morality and risks regarding the Vietnam War.

Robinson implored Eisenhower to do more for African Americans, writing, “I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, “Oh no! Not again!” I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.”

Robinson also engaged Presidents regarding black liberation in Africa and Dr. King’s anti-war stance. He wrote to President Kennedy, “With the new emerging African nations, Negro Americans must assert themselves more, not for what we can get as individuals, but for the good of the Negro masses. I thank you for what you have done so far, but it is not how much has been done but how much more there is to do. I would like to be patient Mr. President, but patience has caused us years in our struggle for human dignity.”

When Dr. King protested the Vietnam war in 1967, Robinson wrote to President Johnson, “I do feel you must make it infinitely clear, that regardless of who demonstrates, that your position will not change toward the rights of all people; that you will continue to press for justice for all Americans and that a strong stand now will have great effect upon young Negro Americans who could resort to violence unless they are reassured.”

Another strength of the exhibition is the number of items on loan or gifted from the Dr. Harry Edwards Archives at the San Jose State University Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change. Dr. Edwards led the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), the group that organized the boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, and continues to work with athletes, including Colin Kaepernick. The exhibition focuses not only on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic anthem protest and its 50^th anniversary, but also the support, solidarity, and demands of the OPHR.

Mere days before his assassination, Dr. King met with Dr. Edwards and endorsed the athletes’ “courage and determination to make it clear that they will not participate in the 1968 Olympics until something is done about these terrible evils and injustices.” Five members of the Harvard Rowing team, due to compete in the Games, appeared with Dr. Edwards to officially state, “It is their criticisms of society which we here support.” Black students at Harvard Law also stated that they supported the athletes’ “willingness to sacrifice the fruits of your labor for the achievement of the goals of Black Americans.”

Though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met one of the demands of the OPHR, that South Africa and Rhodesia be uninvited to the games, and the boycott was called off, Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and other basketball players maintained their stance and did not compete at the games.

Even for those athletes who did compete, the spirit of the OPHR continued, breeding both solidarity and backlash. An OPHR button is included in the exhibition, like the ones worn by Smith, Carlos, and the Australian runner Peter Norman who won the silver medal alongside Smith’s gold and Carlos’s bronze. Displayed adjacent to the button is a State Department memo concerned with what to do about the demands from the IOC to remove Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village, though the athletes ended up leaving on their own, returning to backlash from the press and the public.

The exhibition closes with Kaepernick and notes his connection to the 1968 Olympics. A unique strength of the materials is the inclusion of University of Texas at Austin alumnus Nate Boyer, who worked with Kaepernick to attempt to bridge the divide between his protest and American servicemen and women and their families.

A notable curatorial decision that mutes the political nature of the exhibit and fails to connect Jackie Robinson, the 1968 games, and Colin Kaepernick, is the omission of Jackie Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had it Made (1972). This is a common missed connection in the anthem protest legacy. Calling upon Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”, the introduction to Robinson’s book recalls game one of the 1947 World Series, Robinson’s rookie year. He writes, “The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. it [sic] should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment . . . As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Though the decision to omit the autobiography is an easily defendable one—the focus on Robinson is his breaking the color barrier and his correspondence with Presidents—it stands out because of the inclusion of other athletes’ autobiographies and provocative statements. Perhaps more accessible due to the museum’s possession of an inscribed copy owned by LBJ, Bill Russell’s book Go Up For Glory (1966) is included, along with details of his delivery of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve in the military.

As visitors exit “Get in the Game,” the last item they see is the block quote, “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” from Frederick Douglass. Knowing what we do about Robinson, Smith and Carlos, and Kaepernick, it is also worth considering a quote from Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech:

“The Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

Medieval Facial Hair in Major League Baseball

(via flickr)

by Guy Raffa

What is it with baseball players and whiskers?

The 2013 Red Sox perfected the art of beard-bonding on the way to their third World Series championship in ten years. Boston players and their fans rallied around what Christopher Oldstone-Moore calls the “quest beard” in his history of facial hair, Of Beards and Men. Two years later the Yankees began winning only after Brett Gardner stopped shaving his upper lip and, seeking to propitiate the baseball gods, his teammates followed suit. Lip caterpillars soon dwindled along with victories that first year without naked-faced Derek Jeter, but there were still more staches and wins than pundits predicted before the season began. The 2017 Fall Classic featured two rosters—the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers—modeling a wide assortment of trendy beards, with Dallas Keuchel’s voluminous but well-tended shrubbery taking first-place honors.

Dallas Keuchel and his beard (via wikimedia)

The Washington Nationals entered this 2018 season determined to supplant the Astros for best overall beard garden, but Houston more than held its own in facial fashion and on the diamond, finishing the year with the second best record. Helped by long-bearded pitchers Craig Kimbrel and David Price, the Red Sox led all teams in victories, pulling away from the mighty yet clean-shaven Bronx Bombers, and could well square off against the Astros in the American League Championship Series for a ticket to the 2018 World Series.

Facial hair has been attached to masculine dominance as far back as the late Middle Ages and the early modern period: “No hairs,” so went the pun, “no heirs.” The trend continues. Adjusting to the new normal of fewer shaves and more beards over the past decade, Procter & Gamble (parent company of Gillette), has sought to increase revenue by marketing styling and grooming products more aggressively.

A recent survey of 8,520 women by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia found that, while stubbled faces are deemed sexiest, full-bearded men are favored for long-term relationships. Gay men surveyed also respond more favorably to men with facial hair. Another scientific study reveals that bristles make men wearing aggressive expressions appear that much more threatening. Hence the many pitchers who forgo razors the day of the game in search of a predatory advantage over club-wielding scruffs standing sixty feet, six inches away.

Woodcut of Ezzelino III da Romano, unfortunately without the famous nose hair (via wikipedia)

But forget about staring down plain old beards and mustaches. Just imagine having to face the facial hair sported by the medieval warlord Ezzelino da Romano. By facial hair I mean just that, one single strand. This alpha male, a dark and hairy beast of a man, sprouted a single black hair on the tip of his nose, a genetic abnormality that had nothing to do with fashion but made quite a statement nonetheless.

Ezzelino terrorized inhabitants of northern Italian cities and towns in the thirteenth century. A murderous despot, he was said to be responsible for taking over 50,000 lives, on one occasion slaughtering over 10,000 Paduans by fire, sword, and starvation. He was such a bad dude that the pope of the time, Alexander IV, called him “a son of perdition . . . the most inhuman of the children of men” and launched a crusade against him.

Ezzelino’s nose ornament took hostile facial fuzz to another level. Whenever he became enraged, the long dark hair on his nose immediately stood up, making those around him run for their lives. Anger on steroids. Little wonder that the poet Dante condemned Ezzelino to the circle of violence in his Inferno (canto 12, lines 109-110), placing him with other homicidal tyrants in the Phlegethon, a river of hot blood. Like a meatball in a pot of tomato sauce, a dark head of hair is all that appears of Ezzelino above the bubbling red surface.

Dante and Virgil observe the centaurs shooting the tyrants in Phlegethon. Charles S. Singleton (Inferno XII) (via wikimedia)

Imagine plucking Ezzelino da Romano from Dante’s red river and fitting him in an Astros uniform for game seven of the 2018 American League Championship Series against the Red Sox. There is no score with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. José Altuve, Marwin Gonzalez, and Evan Gattis beam their impressive face rugs from third, second, and first base. Pinch-hitting for peach-fuzzed Alex Bregman, Ezzelino steps to the plate and digs in.

Craig Kimbrel and his red beard (via wikipedia)

Red-bearded Craig Kimbrel gets the sign and checks the runners. Ezzelino waits, his head steady and slightly tilted toward the mound. Kimbrel rocks back, lifts his left leg, and just as his eyes find the target—boing!—Ezzelino’s nose hair snaps to attention, perfectly parallel to the bat in his hands. The terrified hurler uncorks a wild pitch, allowing Altuve to sprint home with the winning run. The Astros are headed to the World Series, while the Red Sox and their fans brace themselves for a long, cold New England winter.

Bibliography:

Will Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2001): 155–87, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1262223; Christopher Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Douglas Biow, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 181-224; Giovanni Villani (c. 1280-1348), Nuova cronica, ed. Giuseppe Porta, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 2007); Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975); Benvenuto da Imola (1375-1380), commentary on Inferno 12.109-112, database of the Dartmouth Dante Project, https://dante.dartmouth.edu; Paget Toynbee, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).

Beard Links:

Beard bonding: http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/10/02/beards/BAQGj2IcEckzCq5Z0Piy3N/story.html

Brett Gardner stopped shaving his upper lip:

http://m.yankees.mlb.com/news/article/120449078/for-brett-gardner-yankees-its-not-a-stache-decision

Wide assortment of trendy beards:

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2017/10/world-series-dodgers-astros-beards-ranked-turner-keuchel-kershaw-reddick-mlb-mlbeard

Long-bearded pitchers Craig Kimbrel and David Price:

https://www.masslive.com/redsox/index.ssf/2018/07/craig_kimbrels_long_beard_isnt.html

Best overall beard garden:

http://www.nbcsports.com/washington/washington-nationals/years-nationals-are-stacked-glorious-facial-hair-bryce-harper-jayson-werth-beard

Fewer shaves and more beards:

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/08/08/909324-beards-bad-gillette-razors/

Early modern period:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1262223?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

A recent survey:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/well/family/are-men-with-beards-more-desirable.html

Another scientific study:

https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/23/3/481/221987

A river of hot blood:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Inf._12_anonimo_fiorentino.jpg

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro Leagues

By Edward Shore

I “discovered” Willie ‘El Diablo’ Wells two years ago on a hot spring afternoon in East Austin. I had decided to skip writing and opted for a stroll down Comal Street, but I was cooked. “Damn it!” I muttered. “It’s too early in the season for this heat!” I took shelter under the pecan trees at the Texas State Cemetery. A bronze headstone caught my eye.

Headstone of Willie "El Diablo" James at Texas State Cemetery. Photo courtesy of the author. — Headstone of Willie “El Diablo” James at Texas State Cemetery. Photo courtesy of the author.

“WILLIE JAMES WELLS, EL DIABLO, 1906-1989. PLAYED AND MANAGED IN THE NEGRO LEAGUES, 1924-1948…BASEBALL’S FIRST POWER-HITTING SHORTSTOP…8-TIME NEGRO LEAGUE ALL-STAR…COMPILED A .392 BATTING AVERAGE AGAINST MAJOR-LEAGUE PITCHING.”

I was enchanted. After all, I’m a massive baseball geek. My morning ritual consists of making coffee, singing along to Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack,” and scouring the dark underbelly of the Internet: the fan blogs of my beloved Arizona Diamondbacks. I own a substantial collection of baseball bobblehead dolls. Furthermore, I am an active member of a ten-team Fantasy Baseball Dynasty League. If you don’t know what any of this means, you’re better off for it.

Buried alongside slave owners, the founders of the Texas Republic, and Confederate veterans lay the remains of Willie “El Diablo” Wells, a native Austinite, Negro Leagues standout, and 1997 inductee of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Only I had never heard of Willie Wells before.

“Ignorance is pitiful,” Wells told the Austin American Statesman in 1977. “If you are ignorant and stupid, you are sick- white, black, green, I don’t care.”

I felt ignorant. I felt stupid. I was crushed. Why had Willie Wells fallen through the cracks of my encyclopedic knowledge of baseball?

Major League Baseball made black ball players like Willie Wells invisible for over seventy years. A “gentleman’s agreement” among American League and National League owners upheld Jim Crow segregation in the national pastime until 1947. African American stars like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck O’Neill earned a living playing for Negro League teams like the Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays, and the Newark Eagles. Between 1923 and 1924, a teenager named Willie Wells starred at shortstop for the Austin Black Senators, a feeder team for Andrew “Rube” Foster’s National Negro League. Wells signed a $300 contract to play for the St. Louis Stars when he turned 18 years old. He chose the Stars over the Chicago American Giants so that his mother could make the day-long train ride from Austin to watch her son play ball in St. Louis.

1928 National Negro League Champion St. Louis Stars. Photo courtesy of the Missouri History Museum.

Wells emerged as one of the Negro League’s brightest talents. He and center fielder, James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell, propelled the St. Louis Stars to the 1928 National Negro League World Championship. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) published this photo of the 1928 championship team in celebration of Black History Month. Wells stands third from the right, the only player flashing a smile. His close friend and fellow Hall of Famer, Cool Papa Bell, is seated third from the left.

A terrific base runner and prolific power hitter, Wells honed his craft in the Mexican and Cuban winter leagues, where he earned the nickname “El Diablo” for his ferocious play. He and hundreds of other Negro League players gravitated to Latin America. “One of the main reasons I came back to Mexico is because I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States,” Wells told the Pittsburgh Courier in 1944. Support for integration grew in the National League in 1946. But Wells was too old to make the jump. Instead, he spent the 1946 season in Montreal coaching Jackie Robinson to master the double-play pivot at second base before his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The story of how Jackie Robinson integrated baseball on April 15, 1947, is well known. MLB has celebrated Jackie Robinson Day since 1997 and all 30 clubs have retired Robinson’s jersey number, “42.” Yet baseball has failed to honor the hundreds of lesser-known African American players like Willie Wells who missed a chance at fame and fortune to segregation. Why? Racism remains embedded in the fabric of our national pastime much like it did in 1887 when Adrian “Cap” Anson, captain of the Chicago White Stockings, refused to play against a Newark, NJ, team with a black pitcher, George Stovey.

Jackie Robinson with the Kansas City Monarchs, 1945. Photo courtesy of the Digital Public Libraries of America and the Library of Congress.

Observe the stunning decline of African American major leaguers. In 1986, roughly 20% of the league was African American; in 2015, that number fell to 8%. The unprecedented growth of the NFL partially accounts for baseball’s diminishing popularity. Still, the sport continues to discriminate against people of color in subtle but pernicious ways. Andrew McCutchen, starting center fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the game’s most prominent African American star, recently penned an op-ed that addressed baseball’s failure to attract black youth. He identified the prohibitive costs of year-long youth baseball- equipment, private coaching, tournaments, and travel- as major deterrents for low-income athletes and their families.

Yet the problem runs much deeper. Take, for instance, the exclusionary hiring practices in MLB front offices. Since the “Moneyball revolution” of the late 1990s, many clubs have favored advanced statistical analysis, “sabermetrics,” over traditional scouting to assess player value. Owners have tasked Wall Street executives and Ivy League graduates with backgrounds in finance, management, and statistics with overseeing baseball operations. The result? The rise of a new boy’s club that hires and promotes its own. Owners have flagrantly skirted the “Selig Rule” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for vacancies at general manager and manager. Dave Stewart of the Arizona Diamondbacks remains the lone African American GM in the game. Al Avila of the Detroit Tigers is the only Latino GM. After the Seattle Mariners fired Lloyd McClendon last October, baseball lacked even a single black manager until the Los Angeles Dodgers hired Dave Roberts in December.

Baseball’s discrimination problem doesn’t stop there. The Atlanta Braves will abandon Turner Field in downtown Atlanta for the greener (whiter) pastures of Cobb County in 2017. On the field, players and coaches police a new color line by admonishing African Americans and Afro-Latinos “to play the game the right way.” This vacuous cliché stands as shorthand for “know your place.” In other words, “don’t insult a white pitcher by flipping your bat after launching a majestic home run into the bleachers, or else.” Owners have also taken steps to erase the historical memory of the Negro Leagues. Last year, the Pittsburgh Pirates removed seven statues of Negro Leagues players from “Legacy Square” at PNC Park. One of the casualties was a monument to legendary power-hitter and hometown hero, Josh Gibson. It is no wonder, then, that the story of Austin’s Willie Wells remains unknown to even diehard baseball fans.

St. Louis Browns pitcher Leroy "Satchel" Paige relaxing in his bullpen rocking chair during a game, 1947. Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum. — St. Louis Browns pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige relaxing in his bullpen rocking chair during a game, 1947. Photo courtesy of the Missouri History Museum.

Fortunately, the Digital Public Library of America offers an essential introduction to the history of segregation in baseball. Educators can use these and other primary sources in their classrooms to both contextualize and personalize the painful history of Jim Crow. A discussion of the Negro Leagues and race in Major League Baseball in 2016 might also serve as a launching point for students to grasp the pervasiveness of racism in the Unites States. By sharing materials with the public, DPLA will ensure that the tragedy of Willie Wells, Smokey Joe Williams, Monte Irvin and countless others will not easily be forgotten.

To learn more about the Negro Leagues, visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO, and the Digital Public Library of America.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

42 (2013)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

The new film 42 tells the story of Jackie Robinson’s heroic effort to integrate Major League Baseball. Signed by Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) endures resistance from teammates, taunting from opposing players and fans, and terrifying threats of violence against his family and himself by breaking baseball’s color line. His loving wife Rachel Robinson (Nicole Beharie), herself a determined warrior in the struggle for racial equality, serves as his anchor during this time of trial. Jackie Robinson’s courage inspires Americans, both white and black, and helps to ignite the emerging civil rights movement. 42 is a stirring film that illustrates the brutality of racism and the heroism of those individuals who sought to overcome the most troubling characteristic of American society in the twentieth century.

Set in the immediate post-World War II years, 42 focuses primarily on Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. A key theme in this movie is the significance of relationships between people, with Jackie Robinson as the ideal candidate for integrating baseball. Branch Rickey immediately recognizes that Robinson possesses the strength of character as well as the athletic gifts necessary to undertake this daunting task. As the film begins, Robinson tells teammates and the press that he is “just a ballplayer,” and Rickey stresses that his job as a baseball executive is solely to win games and make money for the club. But the two men forge a close relationship through their shared experience and, by the movie’s end, recognize that Robinson’s integration of baseball means much more to themselves and to the nation at large. Rickey, portrayed by Ford as deeply philosophical and troubled by a failure earlier in his career to take a stand for integration, finds redemption and a renewed love for the game through Robinson’s bravery. Robinson realizes that he is much more than only a baseball player—he has become an inspiration and a hero for Americans of all races, particularly children, and has touched the conscience of the United States.

The strong marriage of Jackie and Rachel Robinson further illustrates the key role played by personal relationships in the quest to integrate baseball. 42 presents the Robinsons’ marriage as a true love story. Jackie calls Rachel his “heart,” not only the love of his life, but also his source of strength during his times of trouble. Rachel Robinson is as much a civil rights activist as her husband, confidently entering a whites-only bathroom in a southern airport and continuously displaying a calm resolve in the presence of hostile fans in baseball parks.

42 also examines Jackie Robinson’s relationships with the press and his teammates. Besides Rachel, Jackie’s key confidant becomes Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), an African American sports reporter covering these historic events. Robinson initially is reluctant to become too close with Smith for fear of relying on other people for support. Eventually however, Robinson develops a strong friendship with the journalist, who records his accomplishments on the diamond with beautiful prose. Furthermore, Smith helps Robinson realize that he represents more than “just a ballplayer” by confiding his own hardships with racism as a black reporter. Many Brooklyn Dodgers players are wary about having Robinson on their team, pictured most dramatically when several sign a petition against his joining the club. Yet Robinson’s determination and dedicated play win over most of his fellow ballplayers, and by the film’s ending those few remaining doubters find themselves ostracized by the team. In a poignant moment, while playing in Cincinnati, a city bordering the South, Kentucky native Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black) puts his arm around Robinson on the field, a powerful gesture for all fans to see.

The film depicts the cruelty of racial segregation and the valor of civil rights activists in twentieth-century America. Fans and players yell at Robinson hatefully and, in an upsetting scene, an opposing team’s manager viciously taunts him with a barrage of racist insults. Base runners spike Robinson with their sharp cleats and pitchers purposefully try to bean him; by season’s end Robinson leads the majors in hits by pitch. Perhaps most frightening, Robinson receives hundreds of letters with death threats against him and his family. Yet Jackie and Rachel Robinson, like later civil rights activists, handle this trauma with quiet persistence and sheer bravery. Branch Rickey encourages Robinson by invoking their shared Methodist faith, which Jackie emulates through “turning the other cheek” in the face of his oppressors. 42 also soberly illustrates how children imitate their elders, for both good and evil. In a disturbing sequence, a seemingly kind young boy heckles Robinson after watching his white father do the same. However, young black children see Robinson as a role model to imitate in both words and deeds. Rickey further tells Robinson that he has even noticed some white children pretending to be him on playgrounds, a hopeful sign for the future of race relations in the United States.

By expanding its story beyond the 1947 season, 42 could have illustrated better Jackie Robinson’s complexity. Following his first year in the majors, Robinson, with Rickey’s approval, resolved to fight back when persecuted on and off the field. He believed that he had proved he belonged in the Major Leagues and now had to protest against his tormentors to further the larger civil rights movement. To do otherwise would be to acquiesce to the unjust status quo. Indeed, for the rest of his life, Robinson continued to push for greater progress in racial equality. He viewed his post-baseball career in several successful commercial ventures as similarly important in opening doors to African Americans in the business world. He urged ball clubs to hire black managers and front office administrators. Major League Baseball’s failure in this area, coupled with a growing national backlash against the civil rights movement by the early 1970s, left Robinson disillusioned. Yet despite these disappointments, serious health problems, and personal tragedy with the death of his oldest son, Robinson remained dedicated to the struggle for racial equality until his death in 1972.

In 1997, Major League Baseball retired Jackie Robinson’s number 42 for every team. Over the last few years, players of all races have worn the number 42 on Jackie Robinson Day in April. Although additional detail about his entire life could have provided a more nuanced picture of Robinson, 42 is a magnificent film that shows audiences a critical time in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Brilliant actors give unforgettable performances in a movie that should stand the test of time not only as a sports classic, but indeed a masterful drama of American history.

Photo Credits:

Promotional poster for 42 (Image courtesy of Legendary Pictures)

Jackie Robinson signing autographs in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ dugout, Ebbets Field, April 11, 1947 (Image courtesy of Corbis Images)

Robinson playing against the Boston Braves (Image courtesy of The Full Count)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy by Jules Tygiel (1997)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Historian Jules Tygiel presents not only an account of Jackie Robinson’s heroic struggle to integrate Major League Baseball, but a larger history of links between African American history, baseball, and the modern civil rights movement. Baseball’s Great Experiment further raises questions about race and sports in our current day.

The integration of baseball in the immediate post-World War II years profoundly impacted American racial attitudes and culture. Baseball, the national pastime and most popular sport at the time, had remained segregated even as football and basketball had begun integrating. Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey became convinced that the integration of African Americans into Major League Baseball would serve as both a moral cause and an untapped resource of talented players that could strengthen his team. Rickey recruited Jackie Robinson, a former army lieutenant and exceptional athlete who had played numerous sports at UCLA, to initiate his great experiment. Robinson suffered threats, taunts, and abuse while breaking baseball’s color line in 1947, but performed remarkably on the field, carrying himself with a righteous dignity that amazed Americans. Tygiel contends that Robinson’s quest raised awareness among white Americans ignorant to the scourge of racism in their midst. Additionally, the integration of baseball influenced future civil rights initiatives by providing an example of brave nonviolent protest in the face of brutal opposition, and also through illustrating how economic factors could undermine segregation.

Tygiel emphasizes the importance of Rickey and Robinson’s endeavor in the struggle for black equality. Robinson played the 1946 season for the Montreal Royals before joining the Dodgers the next year, thereby also challenging Jim Crow in the minor leagues. Integration in the minors became as critical as in the majors, since farm clubs provided opportunities for blacks to develop their baseball skills. The author notes that black ball players in the minors often continued to face vicious racism, even after Robinson broke down the color barrier in the majors. Robinson’s success with the Dodgers eventually caused other ball clubs to recruit athletes from the Negro leagues, continuing baseball’s integration. Soon African American athletes like Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Satchel Paige starred in Major League Baseball. These ball players became heroes to the larger black community and caused whites to reexamine their racial attitudes. Black major and minor leaguers often challenged southern segregationist mores while in spring training by attempting to integrate hotels, restaurants, and other public venues, setting the stage for later civil rights battles. Tygiel argues that the successful coalition of black protestors (like Robinson), white liberals (such as Rickey), and sympathetic members of the press (both white and black) created a precedent for the modern civil rights movement.

The economics of baseball in small town life also played a role in integrating baseball. Major and minor league spring training provided valuable income for hosting locales, most of which were in the South. After some initial resistance, southern boosters largely abandoned their protests against integrated teams for fear of losing their lucrative deals with baseball clubs. Economics outweighed social customs for most business people seeking to build a prosperous South.

Yet while Robinson and Rickey’s great experiment achieved success, the author reminds us that inequality persists in baseball, and indeed, other sports. In the years following his retirement from baseball, Robinson became disillusioned with the pace of racial integration in baseball, and in society itself. The lack of African Americans in manager and front office positions in Major League ball clubs particularly disturbed him. Although the number of minority coaches has increased since 1983 when this book was published, we continue to see a disproportionately low number of minorities in coaching and organizational positions not only in baseball, but also in football, basketball, and in other sports, at both the college and professional levels of play. Baseball’s Great Experiment illustrates the fascinating story of the struggle to integrate baseball while encouraging us to contemplate the continued presence of racism in sports. Today, with sports occupying such a prominent place in American life, readers will benefit from studying this interesting and moving book about race and athletics.

Photo Credits:

(Image courtesy of ozfan22/Flickr Creative Commons)

(Image courtesy of Black History Album/Flickr Creative Commons)

(Image courtesy of stechico/Flickr Creative Commons)

Film Review – Baseball by the Numbers: Moneyball (2011)

by Tolga Ozyurtcu

Although its subject is one of the more interesting moments in recent sports history, Moneyball offers surprisingly little of that history. The film opens with the disappointing end of the Oakland Athletics’ 2001 season, followed by General Manager Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) novel offseason rebuilding efforts and the team’s unexpected success in the 2002 season. The novelty at hand was Beane’s decision to abandon most of the traditional measures by which baseball scouts evaluated talent, replacing an old-guard of “lifer” baseball scouts and their obsession with traditional statistics, with economics-inspired, statistical models designed to find hidden value in baseball’s talent market. Beane’s shift to the new approach was driven by the inability of his small media market franchise to offer salaries to ballplayers that could compete with the big money, large market teams, like the New York Yankees.

While all of this is communicated reasonably well in Bennett Miller’s film, the casual viewer may be misled to think that Beane’s number-crunching approach was a twenty-first century innovation. What the film does not adequately address is the history of Sabermetrics, the name given to the general approach to baseball statistics that Beane and Paul DePodesta (or Peter Brand, as he was rechristened in the film, played by Jonah Hill) employed in revolutionizing the Oakland team and all of baseball. Sabermetrics are the brainchild of Bill James, a baseball historian, writer, and statistician who has been publishing on the subject since 1977. Through the late 1980s, James published the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract, focusing his efforts on the objective analysis of the sport through unique metrics like “runs created,” “range factor,” and “value over replacement player.” For James and other Sabermetricians, such measures allow for a level of quantitative analysis that links player performance with the production of wins for a team. From the Sabermetric perspective, traditional measures, such as batting average, are limited in that they only describe what a player does, without a useful measure of that player’s impact on the team. For example, while batting average is a traditional measure of the frequency of a player’s hits, James’ category of “runs created” factors in all of the ways a player can produce runs from an at-bat. For a team like Beane’s A’s, value could be found in passing on broadly appealing players with high batting averages, and focusing instead on players with high “runs created” ratings.

The Abstracts were popular with stat-obsessed fans and fantasy baseball aficionados, but James’ ideas failed to gain serious traction in mainstream baseball until the late 1990s, when Sandy Alderson, Beane’s predecessor as the Athletics General Manager began applying Sabermetric principles to identify undervalued players. Beane’s ascension saw the first significant deployment of the methods in the major leagues, with other teams embracing the approach following the Athletics’ success. The ultimate validation for James would arrive in 2003, when he was hired as a consultant by the Boston Red Sox, a position he still holds. Some fans and commentators credit James for some of the organizational and tactical decisions that led to the Red Sox winning their first World Series in 86 years, breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” in the process.

The James approach, especially as applied by Beane, is predicated on a simple idea: the talent market in baseball operates inefficiently due to poor evaluation criteria, resulting in the under-valuation of potentially productive players who can help teams win games. While the innovative exploitation of market conditions is a common capitalist endeavor, the insular, old world, and oligarchical nature of the professional sports business under-incentivizes the type of innovation Beane and DePodesta employed. American professional sports, perhaps more so than any other industry, revels in stable isomorphic practices and employs “tradition” as a bulwark against new approaches to management.

Beyond the standard limitations of the feature film format, Miller’s decision to gloss over this history underscores the point that the concept of “moneyball” is essentially a managerial perspective on resource allocation, while the film Moneyball is baseball movie. In other words, Miller’s film is about the reception of new ideas in the stubborn world of baseball, and less about the ideas themselves. This is probably a blessing for most viewers, who will be thankful to avoid the minutiae of Sabermetric analysis, but those interested in more detail on the subject can read Michael Lewis’ original book, Moneyball or take a look at the Society for American Baseball Research

What does make it to the screen is the rare sports film that is restrained in its use of genre stereotypes and still compels viewers to root for the underdog. Pitt plays Beane well, and Miller is mostly successful in portraying his protagonist as a contrary, but calculating risk taker, only occasionally slipping into sportsman-as-solitary-brooding-hero mode. Opposite Pitt, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays beleaguered Athletics manager Art Howe, and it is a testament to Hoffman’s talent he somehow manages to elicit sympathy from the viewer while embodying the entire baseball establishment that Beane was up against.

In all, these performances and Miller’s subtle approach combine for a pleasurable film that is likely to have some appeal to viewers who do not normally enjoy sports films. Inevitably, some baseball aficionados will be disappointed with what was left out of the film, but most sports fans will appreciate the film and its celebration of a canny underdog.

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