Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin, Part XIII
Jackie Robinson edition … the power of a number … honoring the Jackie’s from our communities, dispelling myths and reflecting on the improbability of it all
"Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin" is my weekly Sunday feature that's a tribute to the sports columnists I grew up reading who penned Herb Caen-inspired three dot columns. It's an excuse to shamelessly plug my other side projects, post my favorite Immaculate Grid from the week with a story about one of the players, link to stories I found interesting, and string together loose topics on my mind.
Jackie Robinson Day is tomorrow in Major League Baseball. My team, the Albuquerque Isotopes, are off tomorrow, so we are celebrating his life and career today at the ballpark. I’m really proud of the way we honor his legacy, and reward local students to learn more about his life.
This is the second year that we’ve offered four free tickets to any student (K-12) who writes an essay or creates artwork about how Jackie’s life inspires them. We received well over 100 entries this year, including entire classrooms who worked on the assignment together. We’ll display the assignments on the concourse for fans to see. Going through the assignments, I got choked up reading one poem in particular.
This is the third year that we recognize an individual who had an impact on the local community. We call it the “Jackie Robinson Making A Difference” Award. This year’s recipient is Pete Gibson. The grandson of Baseball Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson, Pete was a basketball star for the University of New Mexico, then dedicated the next five decades of his life as a teacher and coach at elementary schools.
A few years ago, after reading an article about the first Black players on each Major League Baseball team, it got me wondering who was the Jackie Robinson in New Mexico? The best candidate is a man named Herb “Briefcase” Simpson. Here’s an essay I put together on the local pioneers and bridging the generations.
We also had a local artist named by Noé Barnett create a mural during a game. Here is one image. Additional pictures are here of him at work. The mural hangs on our concourse.
Best athlete conversation
Whenever we debate the greatest athletes in sport, Jackie Robinson’s name is rarely mentioned.
We think about Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders because they played football and baseball simultaneously. Some might argue for a decathlon gold medalist, like the former Bruce Jenner. Really old timers bring up Jim Thorpe’s name.
You can make a strong case for Jackie Robinson. Here are some of his accomplishments at UCLA:
In football, averaged 12.2 yards per carry as a running back. He also played safety and returned punts.
In basketball, led the Pacific Coast Conference (the precursor to the Pac-12) in scoring. Nibs Price, the coach at Cal, called Jackie the best basketball player in the country.
Won the National Negro Tennis Tournament, several swimming events, and a golf tournament.
Jackie’s older brother, Mack, won the Silver Medal in the 200-meter dash at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The 1940 Olympics were cancelled due to World War II, so without the Olympics as motivation, Jackie didn’t dedicate himself fully in track in college. But he still competed a little, set the UCLA record in the Long Jump and won the Broad Jump at the NCAA Championships.
How was Jackie Robinson good at baseball?
Baseball was, at best, Jackie’s fourth best sport. Of all the remarkable aspects of Jackie’s life, forgotten is how improbable it was that he was actually so good at baseball.
At UCLA, he only played baseball for one season. There are published reports of him going 4-for-4 in a game, stealing multiple bases, hitting a home run, and pitching. Keep in mind, statistics were not kept meticulously back then, and it’s unclear what games were exhibitions and what games counted. But the official UCLA records list him with an .097 batting average and leading the Bruins with 10 errors.
Without a future in baseball, Jackie quit the sport. After college, he played semi-pro football and was in the Army. One of the football teams was the racially integrated Honolulu Bears in 1941. Jackie left Honolulu two days before Pearl Harbor was bombed. A chronic ankle injury ended his football career. He was the Athletic Director and basketball coach at Samuel Huston College in Austin in 1944.
Then in 1945, Robinson was encouraged to write a letter to the Kansas City Monarchs baseball team, in the Negro Leagues, to ask for the job. Via letters, he haggled with the team’s owner over the price, before settling on $400 a month. (That’s about $7,018 in current dollars).
When he signed, many considered it a publicity stunt. Jackie hadn’t played baseball in five years. The war had gutted a lot of the best players in the Negro Leagues. Robinson was a hero in the African-American community, but mostly known for his football skills, and the Monarchs hope was that Robinson would increase attendance.
Two weeks later, Robinson was one of three blacks who had a tryout with the Boston Red Sox. By most reports, Robinson was fantastic. Even though Robinson was surely rusty, Red Sox manager Joe Cronin publicly said that Robinson impressed him. Of course, you know the Red Sox did not sign Robinson. The Red Sox were the last MLB to become racially integrated.
Instead, Robinson played in the Negro Leagues. Robinson utterly despised his one year with the Kansas City Monarchs. This is what Jackie wrote in his own autobiography.
“The teams were poorly financed, and their management and promotion left much to be desired,” Robinson wrote. “Travel schedules were unbelievably hectic. … This fatiguing travel wouldn’t have been so bad if we could have had decent meals. Finding satisfactory or even passable eating places was almost a daily problem. There was no hotel in many of the places we played. … Some of the crummy eating joints would not serve us at all. You could never sit down to a relaxed hot meal. You were lucky if they magnanimously permitted you to carry out some greasy hamburgers in a paper bag with a container of coffee.”
In his own words, the only reason Jackie Robinson continued to play baseball was he needed the money.
What were other people saying about him? Newt Allen, Robinson’s teammate with the Monarchs, believed that Robinson’s arm was too weak for the left side of the infield. Various Negro league pitchers said Robinson could not hit breaking stuff. Bob Feller (who had pitched against Robinson in a barn-storming tour) said that Robinson was too stiff in the shoulders to hit an inside pitch.
As the 1945 season continued, the rust came off, and Robinson’s natural athletic ability became evident. Jackie played in the Negro League All-Star Game, although somebody with his celebrity was certainly going to play in that game no matter what.
Then in late August, as the Monarchs played the Chicago American Giants in Davenport, Iowa, Robinson was in Brooklyn signing a deal with Branch Rickey to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson was going to make history. He was going to change America.
Robinson was definitely not the best player in the Negro Leagues. Some believe the player who deserved to be the first to break the color barrier was Satchell Paige, or Josh Gibson, or Cool Papa Bell, or many others. I’ve heard Don Newcombe say that Jackie was the right player at the right time.
Still, I think about the enormous pressure for Robinson to perform. Just because he signed with the Dodgers, it wasn’t a guarantee that he’d even reach the majors. The Dodgers sent him to their highest minor league affiliate, Triple-A Montreal, for the 1946 season.
What astonishes me is that Robinson walked 92 times and struck out only 27 times that year. When you think about the desire to prove your ability, it would be natural to be overaggressive and swing at everything. Remember, he batted .097 at UCLA, didn’t play for five years, then played one year in the Negro Leagues. To maintain the plate discipline to not swing at bad pitches is a testament to Jackie’s internal self-confidence and patience.
Montreal won the pennant that year. Jackie called it one of the highlights of his life in athletics.
In 1947, he made history as the first Black man to play in the modern major leagues. (In the 1880s, a handful of Blacks played professional baseball.) In all, Robinson played 10 years, won the Rookie of the Year, appeared in six All-Star Games, voted the Most Valuable Player in 1949, and won a World Series in 1955 with the Dodgers.
New York Times best-selling author Joe Posnanski once asked Buck O’Neil how Jackie did it. How was he so good, after all those years of not playing, and with all that pressure to perform as the first?
O’Neil’s theory is that the burden of history did not haunt Jackie Robinson. Instead, it inspired him. Jackie simply could not fail. Jackie sensed that he was destined to change America. He would not back down from challenges. He would not stand against racial injustice. He would not move to the back of the bus. Jackie Robinson would not fail … could not fail … and did not fail.
This week’s not-so random Immaculate Grid story: Mo Vaughn
In commemoration of the 50th anniversary in 1997, Major League Baseball made the unprecedent decision to retire #42 across the entire sport. Players who were already wearing #42 were allowed to continue wearing the number throughout their career. The number has never been issued to a new player since then.
Mo Vaughn holds the distinction of being the last to wear #42 for three different teams: the Red Sox (1991-98), Angels (1999-2000), and New York Mets (2002-03).
It wasn’t a coincidence that Vaughn wore #42. It’s because of Nick Bowness, his baseball coach at Seton Hall.
“Nick was a great guy, and he wore number 42,” Vaughn told MLB.com. “We kept getting closer over my years at Seton Hall, and he said to me, ‘You’re going to go to the big leagues someday and I want you to wear this number. But you’ve got to look at the history.’”
For that reason, Vaughn made it a point to not just know who Jackie Robinson was -- but to study up on him.
“That’s when you start figuring out that he was a really special individual,” Vaughn said. “He was so talented, but it wasn’t really even about talent. It was more about mindset and what can you withstand? [Brooklyn Dodgers general manager] Branch Rickey had to take the guy that he knew could withstand the onslaught of what was going to happen to him. A very well-rounded man is the only person who could do that.”
When Vaughn arrived for his debut on June 27 against the Yankees at Fenway Park, one of the first things he did was ask for No. 42 -- a request that was quickly granted.
“I didn’t wear it in the Minors; the numbers didn’t go up that high,” Vaughn said. “I think they went to like 39. I was going to jump out and wear 44 and then I kind of remembered what [Bowness] told me.”
The history of Black athletes in Boston is notoriously awful and deserves a more complex explanation than this Newsletter. I highly recommend Howard Bryant’s book, “Shut Out.”
Vaughn’s lasting impact was becoming the first Black athlete who embraced the city of Boston and became the face of the franchise. Vaughn received the Bart Giamatti Award for Community Service and his desire to help others continues long after his retirement.
“I just reached out. Whether it was South Boston, East Boston, North Shore, South Shore, Dudley Square, Roxbury, down the Cape, I was everywhere,” Vaughn said. “That’s what it was supposed to be. I tried to reach kids everywhere, and that’s what it was about.”
This is a story of the last player to wear #42 for each MLB team.
Why did Jackie Robinson not play for the Giants?
You might have heard the story that Jackie Robinson retired from baseball because he refused to play for the rival New York Giants. I remember hearing this story growing up in the 1980s and 1990s to illustrate the intensity of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry. That story is incorrect.
Here’s the accurate story. On Dec. 13, 1956, the Brooklyn Dodgers traded Jackie across town to their rivals for journeyman left-handed pitcher Dick Littlefield.
What neither team realized was that Jackie had already decided to retire. Jackie sold the rights to his retirement story to Look magazine, which was monthly, and he couldn’t tell people publicly until the magazine got its scoop in publication. The headline of the story was, “Why I’m quitting baseball.”
Jackie was 37 years old and already thinking about his future after baseball. Jackie didn’t get along with then-Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, referring to him in his autobiography as “viciously antagonistic.” O’Malley ordered General Manager Buzzie Bavasi to make the trade.
The magazine included Jackie’s new job with Chock-Full-O’Nuts, which broke another barrier. Jackie became the first Vice President of a major national corporation.
The Giants tried to talk Jackie out of retirement. Willie Mays was eager to welcome him to the team. The Giants even offering to double Jackie’s previous salary – from $30,000 to $60,000 – but they couldn’t convince him.
Among the other jobs Jackie held after playing baseball were baseball TV commentator and football general manager. He helped fund the Black-owned Freedom National Bank in Harlem and established a construction company to build housing for low-income families.
His last public appearance was at the 1972 World Series. He remarked that he’ll be prouder when he sees a Black face managing a baseball team.
Jackie died on Oct. 24, 1972 of a heart attack at his home in North Stamford, Conn. He was 53 years old.
His widow, Rachel, founded the Jackie Robinson Foundation after his death and remains an officer to this day. Rachel is still alive at age 101 years old.
More links and shameless plugs:
This week’s “Where Ya At?” podcast guest is Will Fritz, a New York-based reporter who primarily covers extremism and LGBTQ+ stories for The American Independent. We’re now up to 44 episodes on the podcast for SDSU’s School of Journalism and Media Studies.
This week’s “Crafting the Call” episode focused on the extremely rare straight steal of home in baseball. It starts, naturally, with Jackie Robinson stealing home.