Jackie and Campy (13 page)

When the game started, the Phillies picked up where they had left off in Brooklyn, harassing Robinson unmercifully. Chapman continued with his personal racial attacks. “God Himself could have come down from heaven and Ben would have been on him,” said Phillies outfielder Harry “The Hat” Walker. “Chapman just had a way of stirring up trouble, and when the color barrier was broken no one knew what to expect from him.”
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Ken Raffensberger, who pitched for the Phillies, admitted that Chapman issued “a standing order that whenever any pitcher had two strikes and no balls on Robinson he had to knock him down. If he didn’t, the pitcher was fined $50.” Raffensberger, who was a control pitcher, ignored the order, refusing to put himself in that situation. “I’d make sure to start Robinson off with a ball,” he said, “then I might go to two strikes. But I wasn’t going to bait Robinson, nor was I going to pay any $50 fine!”
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Howie Schultz, the Phillies’ regular first baseman, had similar feelings.

Ironically Schultz had been traded to the Phillies from the Dodgers before the opening of that series in order to make room at first base for Robinson. But he had no ill feelings toward his onetime teammate. In fact Schultz developed a great deal of admiration for Robinson, having spent the entire season with him at Montreal in 1946 and seeing firsthand the admirable way he handled all the adversity. Now Schultz was playing for a man who, in his view, was “still fighting the Civil War.” “While I certainly wasn’t proud of the Phillies’ behavior, I realized that I was the property of their organization and kept my mouth shut.” When Robinson reached first base, Schultz, embarrassed, asked, “How can you stand this crap?” Robinson looked up at his former teammate and replied, “I’ll have my
day.”
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The Dodgers’ first baseman had another bad game, which only led to more verbal abuse.

At the same time, however, Philadelphia’s African American baseball fans turned out in record numbers to cheer for Robinson. “Never before had so many blacks come out to a Phillies game,” recalled Stanley Glenn, who played catcher for the Negro League’s Philadelphia Stars. “Blacks from as far as Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Wilmington, Delaware, chartered buses called ‘Jackie Robinson Specials’ and traveled all the way to Philadelphia just to see him play. We probably had close to twenty thousand blacks at Shibe Park for that Dodger series, and before Jackie broke the color barrier the Phils would be lucky to draw ten thousand—white or black—for a doubleheader.”
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Complaints from the city’s black fans also prompted the National League to order an immediate stop to the assault.
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Silenced by the edict, the Phillies attempted to humiliate Robinson the following day by pointing their bats at him and making gunshot sounds in a mock display of the death threats that had been reported in the Philadelphia newspapers.
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When asked if he instructed his players to ride Robinson, Chapman said, “Yes, I did. We not only did it to Robinson, but to all the other Brooklyn players. We’re not treating him any better or worse than the other players. We didn’t ride him because he’s a Negro. We did it because we are trying to win.”
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But Chapman also insisted that the verbal abuse did not last long and was stopped on his orders, not those of National League president Ford Frick. “We found that every time we knocked Robinson down, verbally or physically, he would just get up and beat us,” he said. “It was better not to get him mad, so after about the third time we played him I told our players to let him alone.”
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As the season unfolded, Dodgers support for Robinson strengthened in response to the admirable way he handled all the adversity. Opposing pitchers threw at his head and ribs, while infielders would spit in his face if he was involved in a close play on the base paths. “Once I remember Jackie sliding safely into second after doubling to left-center field,” recalled teammate Clyde King. “When the second baseman got the ball in the web of his glove he turned around and hit Jackie with it in the side of his face. It was so hard we could hear the impact in the dugout. But Jackie didn’t say a word. He got up, dusted himself off, and stole third
base.”
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Through it all, Robinson persevered. He even managed to keep a sense of humor.

Before one game in Cincinnati, when the Dodgers learned that their first baseman’s life had been threatened, outfielder Gene Hermanski suggested that all the players wear Robinson’s uniform number “42” on their backs to confuse the assailant. “Okay with me,” responded Jackie. “Paint your faces black and run pigeon-toed too!”
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When the Dodgers took the field, Reds fans and some of the players began to spew racial epithets at Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, a native Kentuckian, for playing on the same team with an African American. “We heard a lot of insults from the opposing bench and the fans,” recalled Reese. “They were calling Jackie ‘nigger’ and ‘water melon eater,’ trying to rile him.”
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The Dodgers’ captain, disgusted by their behavior, walked from his shortstop position over to Robinson at first base. Placing an arm across his teammate’s shoulders, he gave him a simple word of encouragement, bringing a deafening silence to the crowd.
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“I don’t even remember what he said,” Robinson remarked years later. “But his words weren’t important. It was the gesture of comradeship and support that counted. The jeering stopped and a close lasting friendship between us began.”
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Duke Snider, a twenty-year-old rookie lockered next to Robinson, marveled at his teammate’s self-restraint as well as his ability to perform so well under pressure. On the field Snider “heard the taunts and insults from opposing players”: “Opposing fans threw things at him. Players went out of their way to spike him. Pitchers threw at his head. After a game I’d see the anguish on Jackie’s face—the frustration and the anger—because he wasn’t allowed to say anything that first year. So he kept it all inside, but you could tell it was eating him up.”
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Rival players weren’t his only tormentors. Once, Robinson was playing poker with Hugh Casey, Marvin Rackley, and Spider Jorgensen. When Casey began losing he stunned everyone with a remark directed at his black teammate. “Ya know what I ah used to do down in Georgia when ah ran into bad luck?” he asked. “Ah used to go out and find me the biggest, blackest nigger woman and rub her teats to change my luck.” Then he reached out and rubbed Robinson’s hair.

Humiliated, Jackie swallowed hard, turned to Jorgensen, and said, “Deal the cards.”
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Hate mail arrived daily. Most of it was directed at Jackie. Rarely were the letters signed, and even when they were they bore fictitious names. Occasionally there were threats to assault his wife, Rachel, or to kidnap their newborn son, Jackie Jr.
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“We tried very hard, the both of us, to make our home a haven,” said Rachel. “It was a place to relax, to assess things and be ready for the next day. So, Jack was as quiet and gentle at home as he was tenacious on the field.”
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Initially the couple and their son stayed in a room at the McAlpin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. There was very little privacy because of the constant intrusion of newspapermen. It was especially difficult for Rachel, who was trying to adjust to life with a baby. A few months into the season they rented an apartment in a two-family house on Tilden Avenue in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, at East 53rd Street. There the pace of life was slower. Jackie could be found wheeling his son in a stroller through the neighborhood or playing stickball with kids in the local schoolyard.
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Now able to find refuge away from the playing field, he began to channel his anger and frustration into his play. “Jack found that the most powerful form of retaliation against prejudice was to ‘hurt’ the opposition by performing well,” said Rachel.
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Robinson was a workmanlike baseball player. His fielding, hitting, and base-running were almost mechanical, lacking the gracefulness of a Pee Wee Reese, but he got the most out of his athletic ability. He was heavy in the legs and ran pigeon-toed. It was his quickness and intelligence, not his natural physicality, that made him a remarkable base runner. Jackie made things happen on the base paths. If he got on first, he stole second. If he could not steal third, he’d distract the pitcher by dancing off second in order to advance. And then he’d steal home. Using a thick-handled, thirty-six-ounce bat with a small barrel, just the opposite of most bats of the time, he swung down and through the ball, producing vicious line drives. If he singled to right field, he’d make a wide turn toward second, challenging the right fielder to throw behind him in order to nail him at first. But just as the throw reached the first baseman, Robinson was sliding into second. Extra-base hits resembled artillery fire, ricocheting off the outfield fences. It wasn’t unusual for Jackie to turn a double into a triple or a triple into a run because it was almost impossible to catch him in a rundown. This style of play was nothing new in the Negro Leagues.
But in the white Majors it was innovative and exciting. The name of the game was to score runs without a hit, something quite different from the power-hitting strategy that had characterized Major League Baseball. During the next decade this new style of play introduced by Robinson would become known as “Dodger Baseball.”
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Slowly the white baseball establishment began to embrace Robinson. In May Stanley Woodward of the
New York
Herald Tribune
revealed an alleged plot by the St. Louis Cardinals to instigate a league-wide strike against Robinson by walking off the field in a scheduled game against the Dodgers.
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Though Cardinal officials denied the report and Woodward later retracted major segments of the allegation, it did elicit a response from National League president Ford Frick, who vowed to suspend the ringleaders if they carried out their plan. “I don’t care if I wreck the National League for five years,” declared Frick. “This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another. The National League will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequence.”
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If such a conspiracy did exist, it died on the spot. The following month, in a game at Pittsburgh, Robinson, trying to beat out a bunt, collided with Pirates first baseman Hank Greenberg. Greenberg, the former Detroit Tigers star who was in the final year of his playing career, managed to remain standing. Tension settled over Forbes Field as he advanced toward Robinson, who lay prostrate on the ground. Some anticipated trouble. But then Greenberg reached out to help Jackie to his feet.
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“He stood there beside me at first base,” recalled Greenberg, a Jew who had been discriminated against when he entered the big leagues in 1933. “I had a feeling for him because of the way I had been treated when I came up. I remember saying to him, ‘Don’t let them get you down. You’re doing fine. Keep it up.’”
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Greenberg, a future Hall of Famer whose actions wielded significant influence among both players and fans, had given Robinson’s crusade a moral validity with that simple gesture. Jews in particular could identify with Robinson because of their history of persecution. Robert Mayer, an eight-year-old Jew who was raised in the Bronx, rejected the Yankees because of Robinson. “It was out of some unconscious desire to root for the underdog,” he confessed in a recent book,
Notes of a Baseball Dreamer
. “With his dark skin and pigeon toes, Jackie Robinson quickly became the
most exciting player in the game as well as the Dodgers’ claim to moral superiority before all the world.”
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When the season ended, the
Sporting News
, which had gone on record earlier as opposing the integration of baseball, named Robinson the National League Rookie of the Year for his impressive performance that season: twenty-nine stolen bases, twelve home runs, forty-two successful bunt hits, and a .297 batting average.
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Those efforts helped the Dodgers to capture a pennant, and on September 23 jubilant Brooklyn fans cheered their first baseman with a “Jackie Robinson Day” at Ebbets Field. In addition to a new car and other gifts, Robinson received tributes for his contribution to racial equality. “Twenty-five whites and one black on our team,” said Bobby Bragan, who had signed a petition against Robinson earlier that season, “and we win the National League. That means we all get $4,500 apiece. You can bet we were all real grateful to the one black guy. We couldn’t have done it without him.”
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The Dodgers forced the New York Yankees to a seventh and deciding game in the World Series. When it was all said and done, the Yanks had added yet another World Series title to their illustrious history.
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But not even that could tarnish the success of Robinson’s season.