Fifty years ago this month, Major League Baseball honored Jackie Robinson before Game 2 of the World Series in what would be his final public appearance. It was the 25th anniversary of the season Robinson broke the color barrier, and the 20th anniversary that October of the first African-American pitcher to win a World Series game.
The first milestone was feted. The second, if the nearly 10-minute video of the ceremony is complete, was ignored. Major League Baseball, which has long had a checkered history when it comes to race, is nothing if not consistent in its inconsistencies.
Robinson was, naturally, heavier and frailer than in his playing days, just 16 years over. His hair was almost completely white, and his head, for much of the ceremony, was bowed.
Former Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber emceed it and introduced dignitaries and Robinson’s family. Pee Wee Reese, who played alongside Robinson for nearly a decade, was there. Larry Doby, who integrated the American League later that summer of 1947, was there. Joe Black, the pitcher whose win in Game 1 of the 1952 World Series was overlooked, was there. Barber no doubt knew of it because he announced it, but he didn’t mention it. MLB probably wouldn’t have had it any other way.
(The folks who ran MLB weren’t terribly much different than those who ran the sports department of the New York Herald-Tribune. Roger Kahn, in Boys of Summer, said Black’s win was an achievement he knew not to mention in the next day’s paper. Kahn, from the book: “No Negro had won a World Series game before, but I had learned the Tribune’s curious definition of importance. ‘Home runs and Joe Black,’ I began a conservative story, ‘the combination which brought a pennant to Brooklyn, yesterday …’ I was confined to writing hits and errors.” Sometimes the first draft of history is where the whitewashing begins.)
Barber was followed by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who congratulated Robinson and praised him. Kuhn read a telegram from President Richard Nixon, who did more of the same. Being an election year, the president wasn’t going to pass a chance to subtly politic.
Nixon, whose love of baseball was more authentic than a lot of his positions on issues, had picked Robinson to his all-time team earlier that summer. Kuhn said Nixon “singled out Jackie as the greatest all-around athlete he has ever seen.” Too bad the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. Robinson supported Nixon for president in 1960 but looked back on that as he did Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World. It made Robinson uncomfortable. As Election Day 1972 approached, Kahn, according to a story he wrote for Esquire a year later, lobbied Robinson to support George McGovern. Robinson resisted. Kahn played the 1960 card. Robinson, according to Kahn: “‘Well, I’ll admit this. Supporting (Nixon) against Kennedy was not my most brilliant play.”
Then Robinson spoke, his high-pitched voice, as Kahn described in Boys of Summer, belying the ferocity of his play. He thanked Reese, the family of Branch Rickey and baseball. But then he chided baseball as only he could. “I’m extremely proud and pleased to be here this afternoon, but must admit I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third-base coaching line one day and see a Black face managing in baseball.”
When Robinson finished, he was greeted as he left the field by Oakland manager Dick Williams, a former Dodger teammate, and Reds second baseman Joe Morgan. It was fitting and just that Morgan would acknowledge Robinson, because perhaps no player in the 75 years since has been more like him, one who beat opponents with his bat, his glove, his feet, his brain, with the long ball, with the short ball, by any means necessary.
(In his book The Baseball 100, writer Joe Posnanski tells a great story about race and baseball. Posnanski was driving through Indiana one day the way Robinson and Morgan played baseball, daringly and faster than everyone else. An officer pulled him over. Posnanski’s book on the Big Red Machine teams of the 1970s was on the front seat, and after the officer determined that Posnanski had written it, he recited the starting lineup and asked Posnanski who was the best of them. Posnanski, still under threat of a speeding ticket, did a quick risk assessment. White officer. White stars on the Big Red Machine. Posnanski: “… the thought occurred to me that my best chance to escape the ticket would be to name a white player, Pete Rose or Johnny Bench. But I couldn’t lie to the guy. ‘It’s Joe Morgan,’ I told him. The officer nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said, and he let me go with a warning.”)
Robinson died nine days after the ceremony. He would no doubt be as pleased and proud as he described to see Houston’s Dusty Baker try to become the third African-American to manage a champion in the World Series that begins on Friday night. And he would no doubt be disappointed and ashamed for his sport to see not a single African-American player in this year’s World Series.
Because unless there’s a surprise when the rosters are finalized, this will be the first World Series in 72 years to have not even one African-American player. (The Phillies played in the last one, too, in 1950.) It’s a low moment for MLB, which has had plenty of them, but it isn’t sudden. The 2020 World Series had one only African-American, the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts. The 2021 Series had only two, and one of those was a pinch-runner, the Braves’ Terrance Gore, who has played in 11 games over five postseasons, and batted twice (the other was the Astros’ Michael Brantley; injury makes him unavailable to play in this one). The 2013 World Series had only one, the Red Sox’s Quintin Berry, who like Gore, was there to pinch-run. Berry played in three games for the Red Sox that postseason, stole three bases, and never batted.
Compare that to the 1972 World Series Robinson spoke at. The A’s had four African-Americans, and that’s not counting their best player, Reggie Jackson, who was injured. The Reds had five. In the 1972 All-Star Game, the American League had five African-Americans and the Nationals League had 10, plus Ferguson Jenkins, who’s Black but Canadian. The 2022 All-Star Game had seven African-Americans combined, even though rosters are perhaps 25% larger.
If representation matters, MLB is striking out. Imagine a sport in which African-American athletes have created some of its most memorable October moments — Mays’ catch, Robinson’s steal of home, Gibson’s 17 strikeouts, Reggie’s three homers on three swings, Joe Carter’s Series-ending homer, Howie Kendrick’s Series-winning homer — and even a few dubious ones — Willie McCovey’s liner for the final out, Mookie Wilson’s grounder under Bill Buckner’s legs, Lonnie Smith getting waylaid on the bases, Dave Winfield as Mr. May — playing a World Series in which not one will be a participant. It’s embarrassing.
There will be several players of color in this year’s World Series, though all will be from the Carribean, Central America or South America. What does it say about our national pastime that it’s more popular outside the country than with an important demographic inside it?
The reasons are myriad. One is economic. International players are exempt from the draft, and thus cheaper to sign (including them in the draft was one of the points of contention in negotiations this year during the lockout; the owners didn’t budge). There’s nothing MLB likes as much as lowering labor costs. Some of it is organizational. In 1982, according to a story at the website globalsportsmatters.com, there were 566 MLB scouts. Only 15 were Black. Morgan, from globalsportsmatters.com: “How can you expect to sign a lot of Black players if you don’t have a lot of Black scouts?” Some of it is approach. College players are more frequently drafted today, and more likely to be white.
Fifty-eight percent of the players last year in the NFL and 73 percent of players in the NBA were African-American. Kyler Murray was a first-round pick in both the MLB (ninth by Oakland) and NFL (first by Arizona) drafts. Given the opportunity to make millions playing quarterback or outfield, he opted for the sport that’s far more likely to lower his life expectancy and quality of life. That should be an obvious alarm that MLB has some self-reflection to do. (Long-term effects might not be the reasoning of a 22-year-old, but even someone that young knows MLB injuries tend more to the oblique. Football injuries lean more to ACLs and concussions).
In 1972, more than a third of the NL All-Star team was African-American, but a third of the players in the entire league certainly weren’t. Quota systems might not have been codified 60-70 years ago, but they were omnipresent in thought. In MLB, it wasn’t just how many, but how talented.
Jim Bouton in Ball Four: “The situation of the Negro in baseball is not as equitable as it seems. He still has to be better than his white counterparts to do as well. … There are a lot of Negro stars in the game. There aren’t too many average Negro players. The obvious conclusion is that there is some kind of quota system.”
Bouton wasn’t wrong. At its peak, African-American players in MLB were never more than 18.7 percent (1981), according to sabr.org. Compare that to the NBA and NFL today.
On the field that day 50 years ago in Cincinnati, eight of the nine African-American players were Morgan, a Hall of Famer; Hal McRae, a three-time All-Star who topped 2,000 hits; Bobby Tolan, a .300 hitter in 1969 and 1970 who was the Comeback Player of the Year in 1972 after rupturing his Achilles tendon in 1971; Tom Hall, a standout lefty reliever whose career was short (10-1, 8 saves, 2.61 ERA and 134 strikeouts in 124.1 innings in ’72, when not everyone had more strikeouts than innings); George Foster, a reserve then but the 1977 NL MVP and 1976 MVP runner-up to Morgan; Vida Blue, 1971 AL Cy Young winner and MVP; Blue Moon Odom, a 15-game winner for the A’s; and George Hendrick, a three-time All-Star who fell 20 hits short of 2,000. The injured Reggie Jackson was a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
Of the nine African-Americans who played in the 1972 World Series, only the A’s Allan Lewis, primarily a pinch-runner, could be described as a journeyman. The Darrell Chaneys of the ’72 World Series were almost exclusively white. (Lewis played in 156 games over six seasons and stole 44 bases but had just 31 plate appearances. The idea of a designated runner was with A’s owner Charlie Finley before Herb Washington. Lewis tried to steal in each of the first two games of the ’72 Series and was thrown out both times by Bench. He pinch-ran four more times and didn’t try again.)
The percentage of African-American players this season in MLB was 7.2%, according to a report by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. In 1958, just more than a decade after Robinson integrated MLB, it was 7.4%, according to figures from sabr.org.
That’s not a coincidence, according to Gerald Early, a professor of African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Early, in a 2021 story for nbcnews.com by Curtis Bunn, attributed the declining numbers today to the end of the Negro Leagues then.
Early, from Bunn’s nbcnews.com story: “And so, it was no longer an intrinsic part of Black culture anymore because Black people weren’t just playing. Black people were running it as a business; they owned the teams. Black people were coaches and Black people were general managers. So, all that went away, and I think it had an impact on Black people’s overall interest in the sport.”
If Early is right, MLB has only itself to blame. It treated Negro League owners mostly with disdain, even as they sought their talent. When Robinson left the Kansas City Monarchs, Dodgers owner Branch Rickey offered no compensation. Indians owner Bill Veeck did offer the Newark Eagles $10,000 for the right to sign Doby, to which Eagles owner Effa Manley responded: “Mr. Veeck, you know if Larry Doby were white and a free agent, you’d give him $100,000 to sign with you merely as a bonus …”, according to James Overmeyer’s book on Manley, Queen of the Negro Leagues. Veeck upped his offer another $5,000, which was accepted. No Negro League owner was in position to play hardball in negotiations. The $15,000 Veeck paid might have been below market value, but it was $15,000 more than the Dodgers paid the Monarchs for Robinson.
Rickey, according to a 2021 New York Times story on the Negro Leagues, defended the Robinson signing by saying: “I have not signed a player from what I regard as an organized league.”
And therein lies much of MLB’s problem with attracting African-American athletes — attitude. Even Rickey, who had the best of motives (in addition to wanting to win), couldn’t disguise his disrespect.
Rickey was responding to Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith, who was far more clairvoyant, if selfishly so.
“If the Brooklyn Dodgers want Robinson … they should pay for him,” Griffith said, according to the Times. “While it its true that we have no agreement with Negro Leagues … we still can’t act like outlaws in taking their stars. We have no right to destroy them.”
Griffith was more prophetic than perhaps he ever imagined. (He may well have been motivated by self-interest. Griffith, like several major-league owners, was landlord to a Negro League team, the Homestead Grays. According to Brad Snyder’s 2003 Washington Post story, “The Grays’ stadium rentals and concessions sales meant the difference between Griffith finishing the season in the red or the black. The owner valued his short-term profits more than the opportunity to snap up the best black players.” The Senators weren’t integrated until Cuban Carlos Paula played for them in 1954.)
Seventy-five years after Robinson signed with the Dodgers, MLB finally contradicted Rickey, and recognized the Negro Leagues as “an organized league.” It added its stats to official MLB records. It was a good, if overdue, step. But as long as it took MLB to act, it might take that long to alter the blowback.
The pick: The Astros swept through the division series and the league championship series, going 7-0. You know who else did that? The 2014 Royals and the 2007 Rockies. Know why there won’t be a World Series trophy at their pennant-winning anniversaries a couple of decades hence? Because neither won it. (Anybody who can explain why Jeremy Guthrie was still out there in the fourth inning of Game 7 in 2014 understands Ned Yost better than I). The Astros were 19 games better than the Phillies during the regular season, the largest Series discrepancy in records since 1906 when the Chicago Cubs (116-36) won 23 more games than the cross-town White Sox (93-58). The team with fewer wins won that one, too. The Series will probably come down, as much of baseball does these days, to home runs. Astros pitchers have allowed just five in 72 innings, leading to a 1.88 postseason ERA. Phillies batters have hit a team-high 16 this postseason, and their .442 slugging percentage leads all teams in the postseason and is 34 points higher than the Astros’. The Phillies remind me of two teams of the last 30 years. The 2021 Braves won 88 regular season games, but then outhomered opponents, 23-13, and won three postseason series. The Phillies won 87 games and have outhomered opponents 16-12 (that’s all from a 10-6 edge they had on the Padres) in winning three postseason series. The 2022 Phillies also seem a lot like the 1993 Phillies, who had an .800 OPS in the World Series and lost it because their pitchers had a 7.39 ERA, even with a Game 5 Curt Schilling shutout (the team ERA was 8.93 in Games 1-4 and 6). Here’s a vote for the former. Phillies in 7.
once upon a .406 