Every year, on April 15, every player on every Major League team wears the same number on his jersey, 42, in honor of Jackie Robinson’s first game in the bigs, on opening day, 1947.
For the casual viewer, this sets up a moment of confusion, followed by one of pleasing recognition. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but I expect a lot of baseball fans end up explaining who Jackie Robinson was, and why he is so honored by baseball teams, to children who are just coming alive to the national pastime.
Robinson is also a social force of continuing authority. Ken Burns has made a documentary about him that aired recently on PBS, and he remains a hero to black ballplayers.
Alan Lelchuk starts his recent book, Breaking Ground: How Jackie Robinson Changed Brooklyn, with the Boston Red Sox retiring Jim Rice’s number in 2009. Rice, a slugging left fielder who had his own travails as a black ballplayer in lily-white Fenway Park, first thanked Robinson, who “paved the way for all black players like myself to enter the major leagues.”
Lelchuk, who lives in Canaan and has taught at Dartmouth College since 1985, goes on to refer, bracingly, to Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner who passed on an opportunity to sign Robinson, as “a patrician bigot,” and I thought, Hmm, this could be fun.
And parts of Lelchuk’s book about the pioneering Brooklyn Dodger are fun, but are sadly too few and far between in this oddly repetitive tale. Lurking somewhere in this slim volume’s 117 pages is a lean, affecting, 30-page essay about Lelchuk’s childhood connection to Robinson, an example of hero-worship that influenced a life, and yes, an explanation of Robinson’s influence on Brooklyn and the nation. The latter theme, while important and no doubt provable, is the source of much of Breaking Ground’s meanderings through the realms of unsupported assertion and, in some cases, wild supposition.
A Brooklyn native, Lelchuk fell under Robinson’s spell in that first season, 1947, and his book is at its best when he writes about his personal experiences of attending games at Ebbets Field, listening to Red Barber call the action on the radio and relating how fandom shaped him. As a boy, he met Robinson twice, while asking for his autograph, and those experiences stuck with him. Robinson became a kind of psychic father figure.
Lelchuk’s own father, a Russian Jew, saw baseball as beneath him, until Robinson came along and became the talk of the borough, when the author was 9.
“And in that guise, Jackie became my benefactor — unbeknownst to him — in the sense that he helped provide me my authentic American identity, against the Russian identity my father wanted to pin onto me,” Lelchuk writes.
Later, talk of baseball, and Robinson, between Lelchuk and his father signals a reparation in their fragile relationship.
If Lelchuk had set out to tell this story, it might have been an easier and more enjoyable read. Instead, he spends much of the narrative trying to convince readers of Robinson’s influence on the wider world.
At this late date, nearly 70 years after his debut in Brooklyn, Robinson’s effect on baseball and on American life is well-known. He was one of the truly essential figures of 20th-century America. He was a baseball great — not only the first African-American player, but the first African-American Hall-of-Famer. He excelled in every facet of the game, but was especially fierce on the basepaths, where he dared opposing pitchers and catchers to throw him out and regularly committed one of baseball’s great feats, the straight steal of home. Robinson also was known for his decorum, both on and off the field, despite the hateful language directed at him. As his career wound down (his last season was 1956) he became more outspoken on racial justice, particularly in sports.
Because Robinson’s groundbreaking 1947 season took place over the course of months, and was national in scope, Lelchuk makes a case for Robinson as a transformative figure on the American scene, but in Brooklyn first and foremost. Robinson’s conspicuous excellence as a player was a source of pride for the borough, then still in Manhattan’s shadow.
Lelchuk makes a good case, but often repeats himself. In such a short book, it’s enough to set a reader’s teeth on edge to come across a sentence containing the phrase “As I noted earlier” or “Once again.”
His argument also leads to some claims that seem to over-reach. For example, Lelchuk notes that Truman desegregated the military in 1948, by executive order. “How much of that decision had to do with Jackie’s national success in 1947?” Lelchuk writes. I’m not a historian, but my answer would be “Not much.” The capable and noble service of African-American troops in World War II was the major impetus behind Truman’s decision.
Lelchuk also needlessly exalts Robinson over other black figures of the era, including Marian Anderson, who sang at the Lincoln Memorial to a huge crowd in 1939 after being turned away from a concert venue by the Daughters of the American Revolution. True, it was a one-time event, unlike the long slog of a baseball season, but Anderson opened doors much as Robinson did.
Robinson and the Dodgers were done in Brooklyn in 1957. Walter O’Malley, a mercenary owner who had pushed out the great Branch Rickey, Robinson’s friend and mentor, took the team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. Robinson declared that the only Dodgers team he’d play for would be one in Brooklyn, even though he was a native of Pasadena, Calif. Although Lelchuk gives no sense of the chronology, he notes that Robinson declined to make the move to Los Angeles, though the Dodgers had traded him to the Giants at the end of 1956. Robinson declined to report to the Giants and announced his retirement in January 1957, months before O’Malley announced he would move the team.
He stayed in New York and became an executive for Chock Full o’ Nuts and later worked for Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Diabetes had robbed Robinson of his health and he died young, at 53, in 1972.
What’s touching about Robinson’s story, and what gets lost a bit in Breaking Ground, was the extent to which Brooklyn adopted him. The borough held a Jackie Robinson Day during his first season, when he helped lead the Dodgers to the pennant.
Every year, baseball holds a day in his honor, and every major league team has retired his number. Lelchuk is probably right about Robinson’s impact, but he could have made a better, more concise case.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
