Jackie Robinson (33 page)

But Jack remembered his pact with Rickey, and his unspoken pact with his people, to do what was necessary to make the experiment work. In a 1–0 Dodgers victory, he singled, moved to third on an error, and scored on a hit by Gene Hermanski. (But on that same day, after forty-seven chances as a major leaguer, Jack also made his first error, in the eighth inning.) To his further relief, the next two games also went to the Dodgers for a sweep of the series. Gradually Jack pulled out of his gloom. A few days later, when he wrote about the episode in a column, “Jackie Robinson Says,” in the Pittsburgh
Courier,
he was nonchalant. “
The things the Phillies shouted at me from their bench have been shouted at me from other benches and I am not worried about it. They sound just the same in the big league as they did in the minor league.”

By then, he had other reasons to feel better. Chapman’s abuse had angered the white Dodgers. Eddie Stanky took up the challenge: “
Listen, you yellow-bellied cowards,” Jack remembered him screaming at the Phillies dugout, “why don’t you yell at somebody who can answer back?” Even Dixie Walker was upset by Chapman, a good friend, and told him so. Pushed by the white players, writers picked up the story and revived charges of anti-Semitic remarks allegedly made by Chapman when he was a coach with the Yankees. In his national radio broadcast, the powerful journalist Walter Winchell chided him. In the
Daily Mirror,
Dan Parker hailed Robinson as “
the only gentleman among those involved in the incident.” In addition, the veteran Philadelphia infielder Jeep Handley, disgusted by his manager’s behavior, apologized to Robinson. Rickey, who had anticipated both the abuse and the response, later commented: “
Chapman did more than anybody to unite the Dodgers. When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified thirty men.… Chapman made Jackie a real member of the Dodgers.”

Surviving one assault, Jack encountered another, different challenge. After managing a few hits at the start of the season (he batted .225 in April), he began a streak of futility that saw him go zero for twenty at one point. Hanging over his head, despite his Montreal record, was the 1945 evaluation by perhaps the dominant pitcher then in baseball, Bob Feller, that Robinson would never hit major-league pitching consistently. Jack began to hear whispers of criticism behind his back—but not from his coaches, who remained unflappable. His manager, Burt Shotton, in his retiring style, shrugged off suggestions that he might bench Robinson. (With his white hair and steel-rimmed glasses, Shotton seemed to personify self-effacement; he even declined to wear a baseball uniform and thus could not set foot on the field
during a game.) The coaches could see that Jack was hitting the ball hard but straight at fielders. In addition, his right shoulder was heavily taped, the result of an on-field collision. They waited for him to come around.

When the Giants arrived from Manhattan to clear the air after Chapman’s departure, their manager, the future Hall of Fame player Mel Ott, was civil to Jack, as was his team. Better still, after rain washed out one game, the Dodgers beat the Giants twice to move improbably into first place in the standings. The mood in the clubhouse was now a little more congenial. At the second game, on Sunday, an incident showed how much the Brooklyn community itself was taking Jack to its heart. A buzz of approval greeted the arrival of Joe Louis as he took a seat in the stands, then burst into rich applause as Jack went over and shook Louis’s hand. “
Photographers sprang up around them like rain lilies after a cloudburst,” according to Red Barber; following on the heels of the sordid episode with the Phillies, here was “a full ball park roaring approval” of two black men. “This was a turning point.”

However, Jack was still in his batting slump. Some thought he was lunging at the ball, others that his bat was too heavy. He decided to change nothing. On April 30, he went hitless again in a loss against the visiting Chicago Cubs. But the next day, May 1, the slump ended when he lined a fastball from Bob Chipman, unbeaten thus far that season, into left field. Next, he sent the Cub outfielder Andy Pafko back against the wall with a sacrifice fly that drove in one run. The Dodgers won, to hold on to first place. Rain washed out two series against the visiting Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates, but the respite gave Jack’s shoulder time to heal completely. Then Jack’s confidence was tested again, when the defending World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals came to town.

Although he would deny its seriousness, Sam Breadon, the Cardinals’ owner, had uncovered a plot among his players to go on strike on May 6 rather than play with Robinson; this action might then spread throughout the league, to turn back the clock on integration. On May 9 in the
Herald Tribune,
Stanley Woodward declared that Breadon had hurried to New York to confer with Ford Frick, the president of the National League (Woodward also revealed that the strike was the brainchild of a Dodgers player, never named). Without hesitation, Woodward wrote, Frick had then sent the following unequivocal rebuke, through Breadon, to the players: “
If you do this you will be suspended from the league. You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. 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 consequences. You will find if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.”

Although Woodward would be accused of overstating the crisis and putting words into Frick’s mouth, the league president himself supported the story and stuck by the words. With this fierce attack by the National League president, which followed the chiding of Ben Chapman of the Phillies both in the press and by the office of the commissioner of baseball, Jim Crow in baseball had lost the war. Individuals and individual teams, such as the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, could continue to fight on, in a protracted rear-guard action. But barring some unforeseen catastrophe, baseball would remain open to blacks.

Against the feared Cardinals, who had overtaken the Dodgers to win the pennant in 1946, Brooklyn won the first game, then dropped the next two to fall into a tie for first place in the league. For Rickey and Shotton, it was a time for stocktaking. Brooklyn had started the season well, but its pitching remained inconsistent and the team was obviously not yet unified. The season was young. The Cardinals, though, were still expected to be the team to beat as the season and the summer ripened. “
We have a great squad,” Rickey remarked to reporters, “but so far we haven’t a great team.” Hurt in part by poor weather, attendance at Ebbets Field was also off. By May 8, when lights went on for the first night game of the year, Ebbets Field had welcomed about fifty thousand fewer paying fans than in 1946 for the same number of games.

Next, the Dodgers headed to Philadelphia for their second series with the Phillies, starting on Friday, May 9. Now, stung by the criticism of his race baiting, Ben Chapman was a somewhat chastened figure. He defended himself by claiming that he had treated Robinson much as he treated players of Italian or Polish background, that the vile language was nothing but a form of initiation into the baseball fraternity. But actions by the Phillies management showed that Chapman was hardly without club support for his treatment of Robinson. First, in a telephone call, according to Harold Parrott, the Phillies’ general manager, Herb Pennock, urged Rickey not to “
bring the Nigger here with the rest of your team” (Rickey had invited Parrott to eavesdrop on the conversation); “we’re just not ready for that sort of thing yet.” Rickey, however, rebuffed Philadelphia; if it declined to play, Brooklyn would claim the games on forfeit. Then, in Philadelphia, the Dodgers arrived at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, their usual haunt, to find the premises barred to them. “
And don’t bring your team back here,” Parrott recalled the hotel manager snapping, “while you have any Nigras with
you!” Scrambling for accommodations, Brooklyn was forced to stay at the more expensive Warwick Hotel.

At Shibe Park, too, the visit to Philadelphia was depressing. Several Phillies players kept up a modified but still offensive version of their earlier vile campaign; from the dugout, Jack recalled, some “
pointed bats at me and made machine gun-like noises.” Worse, the Dodgers lost three of the four games, including a Sunday doubleheader before a record-breaking crowd, and slipped out of first place. But one person had changed his tune: Ben Chapman, seeing his job in danger, asked Robinson, through Parrott, to pose for a photograph with him. Jack agreed at once. When Parrott offered to escort him to the meeting, Robinson demurred: “
This is something I should do alone, not as if I’m being urged.” Behind home plate, the two men held a bat for the cameras. Years later, Jack expressed his true feelings: “
Having my picture taken with this man was one of the most difficult things I had to make myself do.” And yet, in his
Courier
column a few days after the incident, he turned the other cheek, as he had promised Rickey he would do. “
Chapman impressed me as a nice fellow,” Robinson wrote, “and I don’t think he really meant the things he was shouting at me the first time we played Philadelphia.”

By this time, Jack also knew something more about the twisted spirit of a small section of the public. Among his voluminous mail were letters that sickened him, because they revealed levels of hatred triggered by what he, Rickey, and the Dodgers were doing in the realm of baseball. Harold Parrott recalled letters “
scrawled and scribbled like the smut you see on toilet walls.” Several emphasized a general rage against blacks, but more than one involved threats to do violence to Rachel and to kidnap Jackie Junior. After he showed these letters to Rickey, a police captain called on the Robinsons at MacDonough Street in Brooklyn, where they were now living. Rickey was not one to panic, but two letters were so vicious that he had turned them over to the police: “
I felt they should be investigated.” But the names and addresses of the senders turned out to be fake.

Despite these threats, insults, and humiliations, Jack was steadily growing in confidence and psychological strength when, near the middle of May, the Dodgers set out on the trip that would complete the first grand cycle of the season, out west to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis. The freak show that had been his presence a month before, at the start of the season, had slowly changed into something far more ordinary, more human, even as he strove to be an extraordinary player. At one level, Rickey’s experiment was a success; at another, more personal level, concerning Jack’s future, it was undecided. Whether or not he would take hold in the major leagues was still very much a question. His fielding and base
running often seemed superior, his hitting less so. “
I do not profess to be a finished first baseman yet,” Jack wrote on June 7, “and I know that I have made a number of mistakes.” In the New York
Times,
Arthur Daley, defending Jack’s right to a fair trial in the major leagues, also allowed that “
the Negro first baseman hasn’t been any ball of fire.”

No one was more keenly aware of the challenge than Jack. Away against Cincinnati, on May 13 and 14, with the stands jammed with his supporters, the Dodgers lost both games of their series even as he maintained an eight-game hitting streak. In this city, he could stay with the team at the Netherlands Plaza Hotel—but was not allowed to use its dining room or swimming pool. Next, against the Pirates, Brooklyn dropped two out of three to continue its slide. In the first game, some of the Pirates appeared to balk at taking the field against Robinson and the Dodgers, but quickly came to their senses. But for Robinson the series was a personal triumph, with six hits in thirteen at-bats for his best performance in a series thus far. He was also well received by some Pirate players and fans. In one play, hustling to beat out a hit, he collided with the massive first baseman Hank Greenberg, in his first season with Pittsburgh and his last as a player, after a league-leading forty-four home runs for Detroit in 1946, but the two players dusted themselves off and chatted amiably. Years before, Greenberg had endured nasty baiting from various players and fans as a Jew. “
Stick in there,” Jack remembered Greenberg telling him. “You’re doing fine. Keep your chin up.” “
Class tells,” Jack commented to a reporter. “It sticks out all over Mr. Greenberg.”

But not every Pirate was as nice. The pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, formerly of the Dodgers, almost beaned Jack, who threw up an arm but ended up in the dirt, writhing in pain. Some Pirates showed concern, but to Jack the response of his own teammates was far more gratifying; they rained imprecations on Ostermueller’s head. “
The guys on the team are all for him,” Sukeforth commented happily about Robinson. “You could see that by the way they acted when he got hit.… Mr. Jackie Robinson’s going to do all right.” The second game had its own measure of drama. It featured the Pirates pitcher Kirby Higbe, traded by the Dodgers after his part in the move against Robinson. His first pitch to Pee Wee Reese, who had not joined the rebels, was at his head; getting up, Reese hit the next pitch for a home run.

In Chicago, a record Sunday crowd of 46,572 paying fans at Wrigley Field welcomed Jack, who now had hit safely in fourteen straight games. His streak ended that day—but the Dodgers won the game. In this series, Jack’s patience was sorely tested when the Cubs shortstop Len Merullo kicked him after the two players became entangled at second base on a pick-off attempt. Jack’s arm reared back to strike but he stayed in control.
Merullo’s act may have reflected the mood of many Cubs. According to one player years later, this team, too, had been ready to strike rather than play against Jack, until the position of league officials became clear.