Happy Jackie Robinson Day!
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I've been absent of late because of a trip to visit family, but also
because of baseball. Mostly because of baseball. Opening day marks a
change in how time is kept, counted, and cataloged in my house and thus
it severely affects my writing. Somehow baseball sneaks onto the page; names
of players slip into stories, everything is suddenly a metaphor for
baseball and vice versa while a game always hums in the background.
I had a ridiculously verbose bit about baseball, about breaking the color line and perhaps more importantly and sadly the fact that it was drawn in the first place in the late 1800s, but I scrapped it for the wisdom of others. Much has been said about baseball by far, far greater bards than myself. Hell, baseball makes poets out of plain folk (and perhaps plain folk out of poets).
Today is Jackie Robinson Day. On April 15, 1947 Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African American major league baseball player in the modern era. Today teams around the country, with players of all ethnic origins, bear his retired No. 42 to honor his great legacy and that of other Black players like Roy Campanella and Joe Black and Larry Doby and Josh Gibson and Don Newcombe.
Jackie Robinson is the quintessential American hero; reinforcing our great hope that fate and formation shake hands at a seminal moment in our lives. Robinson wasn't the best player from the Negro leagues but he was the right one; hand-picked by a cunning Branch Rickey (whose reasoning was equally moralistic and financial) for both talent and temperament. As the great baseball writer Roger Kahn, who was a close friend of Robinson, states in his book Memories of Summer,
Yours,
Kristen
I had a ridiculously verbose bit about baseball, about breaking the color line and perhaps more importantly and sadly the fact that it was drawn in the first place in the late 1800s, but I scrapped it for the wisdom of others. Much has been said about baseball by far, far greater bards than myself. Hell, baseball makes poets out of plain folk (and perhaps plain folk out of poets).
Today is Jackie Robinson Day. On April 15, 1947 Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African American major league baseball player in the modern era. Today teams around the country, with players of all ethnic origins, bear his retired No. 42 to honor his great legacy and that of other Black players like Roy Campanella and Joe Black and Larry Doby and Josh Gibson and Don Newcombe.
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| Famous No. 42 |
Jackie Robinson is the quintessential American hero; reinforcing our great hope that fate and formation shake hands at a seminal moment in our lives. Robinson wasn't the best player from the Negro leagues but he was the right one; hand-picked by a cunning Branch Rickey (whose reasoning was equally moralistic and financial) for both talent and temperament. As the great baseball writer Roger Kahn, who was a close friend of Robinson, states in his book Memories of Summer,
"Jackie Robinson was something apart. He was unique, solitary, flawed, noble, a figure of pure courage cast in obsidian [...] Most of the sportswriters complained that Robinson was "uppity." I marveled at a curious thing: the same qualities that made a white ballplayer a battler, a competitor, a hard-nosed son-of-a-buck, those very same qualities made Jackie Robinson an uppity coon. Prejudice, particularly among the newspapermen, came in tiers. Ol' Minstrel Show [Roy Campanella] was a terrific fellow, they thought, just because he resembled an end-man in not-very-dark black face. Robinson exuded an air of complete independence, and that was not acceptable in a Negro."Less particularly about Jackie Robinson (he comments in Robinson in the full interview) but still about baseball, I find Buck O'Neil's response to the question about the survival of the game in the modern era for Ken Burns' Baseball documentary just lovely and I'd like to share it (full transcript available here):
"We've done a whole lot of things to hurt it, but it's a type of thing that you just can't kill it. You can't kill baseball because when you get ready to kill baseball, something is going to come up, or somebody is going to come up to snatch you out of that.
I heard Ruth hit the ball. I'd never heard that sound before, and I was outside the fence but it was the sound of the bat that I had never heard before in my life. And the next time I heard that sound, I'm in Washington, D.C., in the dressing room and I heard that sound of a bat hitting the ball — sounded just like when Ruth hit the ball. I rushed out, got on nothing but a jockstrap, I rushed out — we were playing the Homestead Grays and it was Josh Gibson hitting the ball. And so I heard this sound again.
Now I didn't hear it anymore. I'm in Kansas City. I'm working for the Cubs at the time, and I was upstairs and I was coming down for the batting practice. And before I could get out there I heard this sound one more time that I had heard only twice in my life. Now, you know who this is? Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson swinging that bat. And now I heard this sound... And it was just a thrill for me. I said, here it is again. I heard it again. I only heard it three times in my life.
Time starts now. Happy Jackie Robinson Day, folks.But now, I'm living because I'm going to hear it again one day, if I live long enough."
Yours,
Kristen
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