Jackie and Campy (12 page)

Durocher’s unequivocal support for integration and the hard-line approach he took with the petitioners set the tone for the rest of spring training. Unfortunately the outspoken manager was suspended for one year by Commissioner Chandler for “conduct detrimental to baseball” prior to Opening Day. Rickey was forced to turn to Clyde Sukeforth as an interim manager until he secured the services of an old friend, Burt Shotton, a sixty-two-year-old former Phillies manager.
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Unlike Durocher, Shotton was calm and level-headed but did not have as much respect from the players. Since he wore civilian clothes on the bench—which prohibited him from going out onto the playing field—he relied on his assistant coaches to argue with umpires. This would be problematic for Robinson because he’d have to rely on coaches, not the manager, to defend him. Ultimately, however, it really didn’t matter who ran the team on the field. Rickey was determined to make his experiment succeed.

The very next morning after Durocher’s team meeting, the Dodgers’ president arrived in Panama and met with the ringleaders of the petition drive. Confronting each one, he laid down the law: “Robinson was going to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and if any of them didn’t like it, he’d make other arrangements for them.” “I wasn’t elated at all,” admitted Bobby Bragan. “I told Mr. Rickey if I had my druthers, I’d rather be traded somewhere else.”
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Other players who signed the petition—Walker, Howell, and Higbe—made the same request.

Higbe, a pitcher who posted seventeen wins in forty-two appearances for the Dodgers in 1946, was the first to go. After the fourth game of the regular season, Rickey sent him to the Pittsburgh Pirates along with Dixie Howell, Gene Mauch, and Cal McLish for outfielder Al Gionfriddo and a cash payment of $200,000.
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Higbe’s departure was a significant loss for
the Dodgers’ rotation, but it underscored Rickey’s determination to ensure the success of integration. Higbe had no regrets, though. “I still think I would have done what I did,” he insisted long after his Major League career had ended. “I was brought up a southerner and I was brought up to stand by what you believed, even if you were the last one standing.”
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Walker was traded to Pittsburgh before spring’s end. Bragan remained only because Rickey couldn’t arrange a deal.
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The rebellion squelched, Rickey announced on April 10, 1947, that Jackie Robinson had officially been signed to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The noble experiment was in full swing.

Robinson’s first official appearance as a Brooklyn Dodger came against the Boston Braves on April 15, 1947. Despite the cold and rainy afternoon, more than twenty-six thousand fans packed Ebbets Field, and reportedly some fourteen thousand of those were African Americans. To ensure that the crowd would be orderly, Rickey had met with local black doctors, lawyers, and other professionals prior to Opening Day and told them how he expected the black community to behave when Robinson took the playing field. “The biggest threat to Robinson’s success is the Negro people themselves,” he told his African American audience. “We don’t want Negroes to form gala welcoming committees. We don’t want Negroes to strut, to wear badges. Nor do we want Negroes in the stands gambling, drunk, fighting, being arrested. If you do those things, you’ll turn Robinson’s importance into a national comedy and I’ll curse the day I signed him to a contract.”
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The black professionals shared his concern and had their own preconceptions about the behavior of a growing black urban working class. Rickey was also aware of Robinson’s feelings about being patronized by other blacks. “It upsets me,” Jackie admitted during spring training, “when members of my own race make a big demonstration for me in the stands over some perfectly ordinary play I made. It could cause trouble, so I wish they wouldn’t do it.” A proud but humble man, the twenty-eight-year-old rookie wanted “to be judged solely on [his] merits as a ballplayer.”
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Both Robinson and Rickey called on these African American leaders to police the black community, and they complied by mapping out a course of restraint. There were no exaggerated shows of emotion, no unruly behavior, nothing that would detract from the historic occasion. Al
though Robinson went hitless, he provided the crowd with a memorable moment in the seventh inning when he laid down a bunt and his blazing speed resulted in a Boston error. Having reached base safely, Robinson was later batted in by Pete Reiser with the go-ahead run in the Dodgers’ 5–3 victory. Had he done nothing at all that day, it wouldn’t have mattered. Just the sight of a black man on a Major League diamond during a regular season game proved that baseball had finally become deserving of the title “national pastime.”
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When the Philadelphia Phillies arrived in Brooklyn a week later, however, all hopes that integration would come peaceably were shattered. The Phillies, led by Manager Ben Chapman, an Alabaman, launched a verbal assault on Robinson the likes of which had seldom if ever been heard in baseball. The abuse began during batting practice: “Nigger, go back to the cotton fields where you belong,” Chapman yelled. By game time, many of the Phillies’ players had joined their manager in the insulting chorus:

“They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy.”

“Hey, coon, did you always smell so bad?”

“Hey, snowflake, which one of you white boys’ wives are you shackin’ up with tonight?”
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The fusillade of bigotry continued throughout the game. Harold Parrott, the Dodgers’ traveling secretary, claimed it was the worst racial attack he had ever heard: “Chapman mentioned everything from thick lips to the supposedly extra-thick Negro skull, which he said restricted brain growth to almost animal level when compared with white folk. He listed the repulsive sores and diseases he said Robbie’s teammates would be infected with if they touched the towels or combs he used.”
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Robinson, standing at first base, was initially stunned by the abuse. But as it continued he became enraged, like a time bomb waiting to explode. Nothing, not even Rickey’s role-playing, laced as it was with the anticipated racial epithets, had prepared him for the treatment he was experiencing. Years later, Robinson recalled:

Once again Jackie’s desire to strike back was fueled by his notions of manhood. To ignore the abuse might have been the moral high ground that Rickey demanded, but it was a reflection of cowardice to him. Each racial epithet fanned the flames of the fire that burned inside, and yet he had promised to restrain himself. Indeed it would have been a “glorious, cleansing thing to let go” and “smash the teeth of one of those [Phillies],” but the experiment with integration would have ended then and there. No doubt the Phillies knew that just as much as Robinson did, so they continued to provoke him, pushing him closer to the breaking point.

Jackie got some measure of revenge in the eighth inning. With the teams deadlocked in a scoreless tie, he singled, stole second, advanced to third on a throwing error by the Phillies catcher, and scored the game’s only run on Gene Hermanski’s single. Going hitless in the final two games of the series, Robinson’s slump only added to the Phillies’ contention that he “didn’t belong in the majors” and was “only there to draw those nigger bucks to the gate for Rickey.”
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Bench-jockeying was a tradition in baseball, and no topic was sacred. Personal problems, appearance, ethnicity, and race were all considered fair game. But the Phillies’ verbal abuse of Robinson exceeded even baseball’s broadly defined sense of propriety. Fans seated near the team’s dugout wrote letters of protest to Commissioner Chandler, who responded by contacting Phillies owner Bob Carpenter and demanding that the harassment cease immediately or he would be forced to invoke punitive measures against the organization.
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When he learned of Chandler’s edict, Chapman defended his actions, insisting that the Phillies would “treat Robinson the same as we do any other man who is likely to step to the plate and beat us.” He noted that Hank Greenberg of the Pirates and Joe Garagiola of the Cardinals had been the targets of ethnic slurs. “There is not a man who has come to the
big leagues who has not been ridden,” said Chapman. “Besides, Robinson did not want to be patronized.” He had been given nothing more than the “same test experienced by all rookies.”
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Chapman’s defense elicited the support of many Philadelphia fans and sportswriters who “commended him for his fair stand toward Robinson.”
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Robinson himself publicly downplayed the abusive treatment, stating that the Phillies’ bench jockeys were “trying to get me upset” but it “really didn’t bother me.”
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Just as he promised Rickey, Robinson turned the other cheek. His Dodgers teammates, however, were not as forgiving.

Dixie Walker, who began the petition drive against Robinson, chastised Chapman, a fellow Alabaman, for his inappropriate behavior. Eddie Stanky, another petitioner, called Chapman a “coward” and challenged him to “pick on someone who can fight back.”
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Inadvertently Chapman had rallied the Dodgers around their black teammate. They admired Robinson for his tremendous restraint in the face of discrimination. According to Rickey, Chapman’s “string of unconscionable abuse unified thirty men, not one of whom was willing to sit by and see someone kick around a man who had his hands tied behind his back.”
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Two weeks later, on May 9, the day before the Dodgers were to take a train to Philadelphia for the first extended road trip of the season, Robinson received two anonymous letters, warning him to “get out of baseball.” Instead of turning the letters over to the police, he gave them to Rickey, who investigated the matter and concluded there was no real danger to Robinson’s life.
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On the same day Rickey received a phone call from Herb Pennock, the Phillies general manager. “You just can’t bring that nigger here with the rest of the team, Branch,” Pennock allegedly said. “We’re just not ready for that sort of thing yet. We won’t be able to take the field if that Robinson boy is in uniform.”

“Great!” Rickey exclaimed, calling the Phillies’ executive’s bluff. “That means we win all three games by default, and the way things are going, we sure can use those victories.” Infuriated by the response, Pennock hung up.

Whether the conversation was fact or fiction remains a subject of controversy. Originally quoted by Harold Parrott, the Dodgers’ traveling secretary, in his 1976 book
The Lords of Baseball
, the purported exchange was given greater legitimacy by Jules Tygiel’s 1983 book,
Baseball’s Great Experiment
, which historians widely consider to be the most accurate record of
Robinson’s quest to break the color line.
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Neither Rickey nor Pennock is still alive to confirm the conversation, and Parrott’s claim that the Dodgers’ president allowed him to eavesdrop on the exchange casts a shadow of doubt over its legitimacy.
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Robinson himself attributed the telephone call to the Phillies owner, Bob Carpenter.
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More recently his widow admitted that she hadn’t even heard of Pennock’s alleged racial epithet and that because the conversation “is not sufficiently documented” she would “not take a position on it.”
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Regardless of the substance of the phone call or who made it, one thing is clear: the Phillies front office had no intention of welcoming Robinson to Shibe Park. Just as clear was the team’s intention to boycott the series. Of the Phillies who saw regular playing time in 1947, seven were from the South, including shortstop Lamar “Skeeter” Newsome, center fielder Harry “The Hat” Walker, and third baseman Jim Tabor.
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In spite of the strong southern sentiment on the club, level heads prevailed. According to catcher Andy Seminick, the Phillies had intended to boycott the Dodgers series until Newsome “called a meeting and convinced us not to do it.” “Our manager, Ben Chapman, was adamant about not playing against Robinson,” recalled Seminick. “Being from Alabama, he just couldn’t understand why whites should have to play against blacks. So we were all set to boycott the Brooklyn series, until Newsome convinced us that a boycott would be morally wrong. He believed that Robinson, like any other man, should have the opportunity to play baseball. The fact that Newsome also came from Alabama, I think, carried a lot of weight with the other players.”
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The Phillies relented, but Robinson still wasn’t welcomed in the city. When the Dodgers tried to check in at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, the bellhops stacked their luggage out on the sidewalk at Ninth and Chestnut streets. Harold Parrott was told that no rooms were available and not to return “while you have any nigras with you.” Instead of forcing a confrontation, the Dodgers changed their accommodations to the more expensive Warwick Hotel, where the manager said he’d be delighted to have them.
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At Shibe Park the following day, a huge crowd came to see—and jeer—Robinson. Shortly before game time he made a much publicized walk to the Phillies dugout for a conciliatory photograph with Chapman. In light of all the negative publicity of the first series between the two teams, both
club owners requested the photo of the two men shaking hands. While Chapman agreed to pose for the photographers, he refused to shake Robinson’s hand. The most he would do was share a bat with the Dodgers’ first baseman. Rumors abounded that the Phils skipper agreed to pose for the picture only to save his job. But Chapman insisted that he agreed only because his good friend and general manager, Herb Pennock, asked him to do it for “
The New York Times
, which had requested the picture.”
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For Robinson, the photo shoot was a painful necessity. He later confessed, “[I] could think of no occasion where I had more difficulty swallowing my pride than in agreeing to pose for a photograph with a man for whom I had the lowest regard.”
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