Rookie of the Year

It was only a month since Speedster Enos Slaughter of the St. Louis Cardinals, galloping into first base, had spiked First Baseman Jackie Robinson. Jackie, the first avowed Negro in the history of big-league baseball, looked at his ripped stocking and bleeding leg. It might have been an accident, but Jackie didn’t think so. Neither did a lot of others who saw the play. Jackie set his teeth, and said nothing. He didn’t dare to.

Last week the Brooklyn Dodgers faced the Cards again, and this time the pennant—and the Dodgers’ none-too-healthy 4½-game lead—was at stake. The Cards, somewhat housebroken descendants of the rough-&-tumble Gashouse Gang, were lighting back, late and hard. In the second inning, Jackie Robinson was spiked again —this time by trigger-tempered Catcher Joe Garagiola.

Next inning, at the plate, there was a face-to-face exchange of hot words between Robinson and Garagiola—the kind of rough passage that fans appreciatively call a “rhubarb.” Umpire “Beans” Reardon hastily stepped between the two and broke it up. That was the end of it: no fisticuffs on the field, no rioting in the stands. But it was a sign, and an important one, that Jackie had established himself as a big leaguer. He had earned what comes free to every other player: the right to squawk.

That change of attitude showed, as nothing else could, the progress of Jackie Roosevelt* Robinson in the toughest first season any ballplayer has ever faced. He had made good as a major leaguer, and proved himself as a man. Last week The Sporting News, baseball’s trade paper, crowned him the rookie of the year. The Sporting News explained, carefully and a little grandiloquently, that it had made the choice solely on the basis of “stark baseball values.” Wrote Editor J. G. Taylor Spink:

“Robinson was rated and examined solely as a freshman player in the big leagues —on the basis of his hitting, his running, his defensive play, his team value. The sociological experiment that Robinson represented, the trail-blazing he did, the barriers he broke down did not enter into the decision.”

The “sociological experiment” may not have been foremost in Taylor Spink’s mind, but it was never out of Jackie’s. He, his teammates and the National League had broken baseball’s 60-year color line. Only two years had passed since Rogers Hornsby declared, and baseball know-it-alls everywhere had nodded in assent: “Ballplayers on the road live close together … it won’t work.”

Wobbling Rabbit. The man who had made it work is a well-muscled, pigeontoed, 28-year-old rookie from Pasadena, Calif., who, along with Glenn Davis and Babe Didrikson Zaharias, is one of the great all-round athletes of his day.

He looks awkward, but isn’t. He stops and starts as though turned off & on with a toggle switch. He seems to hit a baseball on the dead run. Once in motion, he wobbles along, elbows flying, hips swaying, shoulders rocking—creating the illusion that he will fly to pieces with every stride. But once he gains momentum, his shoulders come to order and his feet skim along like flying fish. He is not only jackrabbit fast, but about one thought and two steps ahead of every base-runner in the business. He beats out bunts, stretches singles into doubles. Once Jackie made second on a base-on-balls; he saw that the catcher had lost the ball, so he just kept on going.

He has stolen 26 bases this season, more than any other National Leaguer. He dances and prances off base, keeping the enemy’s infield upset and off balance, and worrying the pitcher. The boys call it “showboat baseball.” He is not, in his first year, the greatest baserunner since Ty Cobb, but he is mighty good. Cobb made a practice of coming in with spikes aimed at anyone brave enough to get in his way. It wouldn’t have been politic for Jackie to do it that way very often. Robinson’s base running, which resembles more the trickiness of “Pepper” Martin, is a combination of surprise, timing and speed. Says Jackie: “Daring . . . that’s half my game.”

Turnstile Sociology. Jackie’s daring on the baselines has been matched by shrewd Branch Rickey’s daring on the color line. Rickey gave Robinson his chance. As boss of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rickey is a mixture of Phineas T. Barnum and Billy Sunday, who is prone to talk piously of the larger and higher implications of what he is doing. There were large implications, of course, in signing Jackie Robinson, but the influence on the box office was a lot easier to figure. Jackie Robinson has pulled about $150,000 in extra admissions this season.

Wherever the Dodgers have played, Negroes have turned out in force to see their hero. In Chicago, where Negro fans sported Jackie Robinson buttons, Jackie’s fans came early and brought their lunch. In Jim Crowish St. Louis, where Negroes must sit in the right-field pavilion, the Robinson rooting section was more noticeable. Their adulation embarrassed Robbie: it made it harder for him to act like just another ballplayer. Rickey had promised to treat Jackie “just like any other rookie,” and he certainly did on the payroll. Though he may have to pay Jackie more next season, so far Rickey has paid the crowd-pulling rookie-of-the-year only $5,000. Under league rules that is the least that the poorest rookie can be paid.

This week, as the Dodgers raced toward the finish seven games ahead, it was at least arguable that Jackie Robinson had furnished the margin of victory. The Dodgers are certainly not a one-man ball club. They have a bull-necked powerhouse of a catcher named Bruce Edwards, 24, whose special talents are steadiness and hustle. In Pee Wee Reese and Eddie Stanky, both short of height but long on skill, they have the best keystone combination in the league. The Dodgers also have a special affection for 34-year-old relief pitcher Hugh Casey, who has come onto the hill to save game after game, and is held in higher esteem by his team mates than strong-arm Ralph Branca, the Dodgers’ only 20-game winner. And of course there is Dixie Walker, the “Pee-pul’s Cherce,” who at 36 still hits when it will do the most good—with men on base. In a locker-room gabfest a few weeks ago, the Dodgers agreed among themselves that Jackie Robinson was the team’s third most valuable player—behind Edwards and Reese.

No Drink, No Smoke. Branch Rickey, the smartest man in baseball, had looked hard and waited long to find a Negro who would be his race’s best foot forward, as well as a stout prop for a winning ball team. Rickey and his men scouted Robinson until they knew everything about him but what he dreamed at night. Jackie scored well on all counts. He did not smoke (his mother had asthma and cigaret fumes bothered her); he drank a quart of milk a day and didn’t touch liquor; he rarely swore; he had a service record (as Army lieutenant in the 27th Cavalry) and two years of college (at U.C.L.A.). He had intelligence, patience and willingness. He was aware of the handicaps his race encounters, but he showed it not by truculence or bitterness, and not by servility, but by a reserve that no white man really ever penetrated. Most important of all Robinson’s qualifications, he was a natural athlete. Says Rickey: “That’s what I was betting on.”

Pepper Street Gangman. It ran in the family. His older brother, Mack, was second in the 200-meter run at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Jackie was a broad-jumper who once set a Southern California junior college record of 25 ft. 6½ in.

The Robinson family—four boys and a girl—grew up on Pepper Street in the poor section of well-to-do Pasadena. They never knew their father (mother still doesn’t talk about him). To support the kids, mother Robinson took in washing & ironing. Jackie, the youngest, was a charter member of the Pepper Street Gang, half a dozen Negroes and three or four American-Japanese who liked to break street lamps and watch the changing colors of the shattered bulbs. “It was awful pretty,” recalls Jackie.

He played softball on the corner lot with the gang, occasionally earned pocket money by sneaking onto neighboring golf courses to retrieve lost balls. He could outrun the gang—and the cops—every time. But a stern talk from Ma Robinson put him out of business. She was, and is, a fervent Methodist who can be volubly graphic on the subject of hell. (A few weeks ago, when the Dodgers were not doing so well, Jackie wrote to his ma: “Quit praying just for me alone, Ma, and pray for the whole team.”)

Ma Robinson regarded it as sinful for twelve-year-old Jackie to be playing baseball at Brookside Park on Sundays while the pews at Preacher Scott’s church were half empty. “The devil is sending the people to watch you play,” said Mama, “and he’s also sending you to play.” Jackie won her over by taking her to a few games. She kept quiet until he began playing football, a game which disturbed both her religious and maternal instincts. One Saturday three Glendale High School players piled on Jackie and cracked two of his ribs. She still remembers that day: “I seen them throwing water on my boy and I wanted to rush down there and help him. But he got up and walked off the field and I sat down. After that, I always worry about my baby.”

Man in Motion. But Jackie could take care of himself. At U.C.L.A. he was one of the slickest halfbacks who ever put on cleats. His ball-carrying average: a remarkable twelve yards a try. Jackie was used mostly as the man-in-motion on offense, because of his skill at faking and feinting. He won All-America honorable mention. U.C.L.A.’s heavy-duty ballcarrier was another Negro, talented Kenny Washington, who made the All-America first team. He and Jackie had no particular love for each other, but both deny persistent campus rumors that they once had a knockdown, drag-out fight in a dark alley. “T’ain’t so,” says Jackie, “I’m not dumb enough to have a fight with Kenny. He’s too big.”

Jackie has never tried boxing, but Branch Rickey is convinced that Jackie would be sensational at it—or at any other sport he tried. In basketball, Jackie was the leading scorer of the Pacific Coast Conference for two years. He did not play tennis much, but the first time he played in the Negro National Tournament, he got to the semifinals. Baseball was the game he had played longest and liked least.

Two years ago, after 31 months in the Army, Jackie signed up as a shortstop for the barnstorming Kansas City Monarchs. It was a Negro club featuring old and reliable Pitcher “Satchel” Paige, who would have been a big leaguer once, had the big leagues been willing to admit Negroes sooner. The grubby life with the Monarchs was a shock to college-bred Jackie. The Monarchs traveled around in an old bus, often for two or three days at a time (the league stretches from Kansas City to Newark) without a bath, a bed, or a hot meal, and then crawled out long enough to play a game. The smart ones got aboard the bus early, rolled up their uniforms for a pillow, and slept in the aisle. “After two months of it, I was for quitting,” says Jackie. “No future.” He didn’t know it, but all the time Branch Rickey was getting reports of Jackie’s playing, and of his .340 batting average.

When Rickey hired Jackie away from the Monarchs there were loud and angry outcries, and not all of them were in a Southern accent. Some of the ugliest comments were spoken in ripe, raucous Brooklynese. Even some owners in the low-paying Negro leagues protested against “raiding” their men. There had been Negroes in big-league ball before, but they had been careful to identify themselves as Indians or “Cubans.” The late Minor League President Bill Bramham cried: “Father Divine will have to look to his laurels, for we can expect Rickey Temple to be in the course of construction in Harlem soon.” Rickey, ignoring the uproar, treated Jackie “white,” giving him a year’s seasoning in the minors. The four other Negroes who followed Robinson to the big leagues this season (and were generally failures) had no such break.

Jackie faced hostility, suspicion, curiosity and every newspaper camera within miles when he reported to the International League’s Montreal club for training.

Jackie spoke to his teammates only when spoken to, and his replies were brief and polite. He had long ago made it a rule to “let them make the first move.” Soon after the season opened, the Montreal players were with him. It took longer to win over some of the fans, and the other players in the League.

Black Cat, Good Luck. He was booed in Baltimore. In Syracuse one day, the rival team let out a black cat from their dugout as Jackie walked up to bat. Jackie got mad and hit a triple with the bases loaded. By the time the season ended, his doctor told him that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but nobody would have guessed it by looking at his record. Second Baseman Robinson led the International League in batting (with a .349 average) and in fielding (with a .985 average). Montreal won the pennant, and the fans, after one game, chaired Jackie and carried him around the field. Jackie Robinson was ready for the Dodgers.

Do’s & Don’ts. Montreal had been won over, but that cut no ice in Flatbush. Branch Rickey, who knows his fellow citizens, set out to soften them up. He organized a group of Brooklyn’s leading Negro citizens, including one judge, into a formal “how-to-handle-Robinson committee.” In every other city in the National League, Rickey set up similar committees. The Brooklyn committee drew up a list of do’s and don’ts a yard long; Jackie’s deportment in public & private was to be supervised as thoroughly as Princess Elizabeth’s.

He could not, like other ballplayers, endorse breakfast foods (or any other product, for that matter) at the usual $1,000 per endorsement. He could sign his name to no magazine or newspaper articles. When he got what he considered a bad decision from the umpire, he was not to object. When another player insulted him, he was to grin and bear it. He had to leave the ballpark after games by a secret exit. It was as important to avoid adulation as it was to avoid brickbats; there were to be no Jackie Robinson Days at Ebbets Field. He was not to accept any social invitations, from whites or blacks, and he was to stay away from night spots.

Jackie Robinson had already learned, by a lifetime’s practice, the lesson another Robinson—soft-shoe dancing Bojangles* —once laid down while acting as the unofficial Mayor of Harlem. Bojangles’ formula: “Do the best you can with what you’ve got . . . and get along with the white folks.” Jackie had no desire to be a martyr for his race; he was just a young fellow anxious to make a living as a ballplayer. Though he barely knew Joe Louis, he sought him out for advice. He got an earful which boiled down to three words: “Don’t get cocky.”

Jackie lives a long way from Harlem’s high life, in a five-room, second-floor flat on Brooklyn’s McDonough Street, in a Negro neighborhood. His name is not on the door, and he knows few of his neighbors. How he feels about them shows through the guarded brevity of his speech, which sometimes carries a suggestion of dryness. Says he: “I don’t want to bother with too many people who want to be my relatives.”

Jackie’s idea of a fine way to spend a night off is to go to bed early. He averages ten hours’ sleep. He likes neither music nor dancing. “You know,” he says, “colored people do not like music and dancing any better than white people . . . the white people just think they do.” At home, he carefully takes his vitamin pills, spends a lot of time baby-sitting with his nine-month-old son, and according to his wife (whom he met at U.C.L.A.), always has his face buried in a paper. Like most ballplayers, he soaks up every word in every newspaper in town that concerns him and his team. His reader reaction: “Some reporters write nice things about me and mean them, and others write nice things and don’t mean them. I can always tell.”

So that Jackie would have company when the Dodgers were on the road, Rickey persuaded a Negro newsman, Wendell Smith, to travel with the club. In two cities, Jackie said, he had hotel trouble; he was not welcome at the Chase, where the Brooklyn club stays in St. Louis, or at Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin. (“They fooled me,” said Jackie. “I thought it would be St. Louis and Cincinnati.”)

No Help at First. Branch Rickey’s do’s & don’ts strangely enough, did not include any instructions on how to play baseball. Although Jackie had played second base or shortstop all his life, he was handed a first-baseman’s mitt and sent out to sink or swim at a new position —first base. Being right-handed was no help: first base is a left-hander’s position. It is easier for a left-hander to throw from first to any other base, and easier to pick a man off the bag. Only a few great first basemen (among them the Cubs’ Frank Chance and the Giant’s George Kelly) were righthanded. But Robinson, with a tricky “scissors” pivot, manages to get rid of the ball as quickly as any southpaw first baseman in the league.

His biggest difficulty is trying to forget that he is a shortstop. Fielding ground balls, he scoops them up as if he had a quick throw to make. And because he does not crouch down to block the ball, a lot of grounders dribble between his legs. He also can’t seem to break his habit of catching put-out throws two-handed. The Cardinals’ Stan Musial, for example, gets a far longer reach by taking throws singlehanded.

A right-handed hitter, Jackie has a habit of swinging too soon and his motion is half chop, ‘half lunge. As a result, he fouls off a lot of balls to the left. But his batting average at week’s end was a solid .301. The wise boys who judge a hitter by his Runs Batted In totals are apt to take too fast a look at Jackie’s R.B.I, and grumble that Jackie can’t hit in a tight spot. But as the club’s No. 2 hitter in the lineup, Jackie’s job is either to push along the lead-off man by a sacrifice, or to get on base himself. Jackie’s R.B.I, total (44) is higher than most No. 2 hitters’—including Philadelphia’s Harry Walker, who is baseball’s current batting king with an average of .362.

Actually, Jackie at bat is most dangerous when the odds are against him. When the count gets to two strikes, as he explains it: “Then I begin to crowd the plate a little.” Says Branch Rickey: “He is the best batter in the game with two strikes on him.” Pitchers capitalize on his hasty swing by feeding him slow stuff. “I just can’t hit those nuthin’ pitches,” Jackie complains. Because he is the best bunter in the game, the Dodgers “cut him loose” at the plate (i.e., let him decide for himself whether to take, hit or bunt). He and Pete Reiser are also the only Dodgers good enough to be “cut loose” on the bases, allowed to steal without waiting for a signal.

Timing & Tricks. By now, Robbie has carefully catalogued pitchers’ weaknesses. He has, for example, discovered that when Boston’s Si Johnson crooks his neck in a certain way, Si has stopped worrying about the base-runner and is about to pitch. This discovery gives Jackie a split-second head start on his way to second.

A similar mixture of timing and careful study enabled him to steal home last month against the New York Giants. (It was the second time this year he had pulled off the most spectacular base-running trick of them all.) Standing on third, Jackie carefully watched Pitcher Joe Beggs’ windup. Robinson ran in with the pitch as far as he dared, then slammed on the brakes and began to count: “One-two-three-four. . . .” He ticked off how long it took Beggs to get the ball across the plate. Satisfied that he could have made it in that time, Jackie scurried back to third base and took a deep breath. Next pitch, as Beggs involved himself in another slow-motion windup, Robinson was off like an express, rushing for the plate. The pitcher froze like a man with a high-voltage electric wire in his hand. Jackie went home standing up.

Who taught him to do things like that? Says Branch Rickey: “Primarily God.”

The Other Cheek. It is impossible to measure how much better, or how much worse, Jackie’s first season might have been had his handicaps been fewer. It was not just that he was playing an unfamiliar position, or that at 28 he was pretty old for a rookie. He also had to turn the other cheek to abuses and insults. First he had to overcome the attitude of his fellow Dodgers, which ranged from mere wait-&-see standoffishness to Southern-bred hostility.

And the rough stuff from rival teams began early and has never stopped. The first time the Dodgers played St. Louis, the Cards grumbled about playing on the same field with a Negro. They changed their minds—under pressure. Philadelphia was worse, because there the opposition had the open support of Phillies Manager Ben Chapman. He bawled insults at Robinson from the dugout. Chapman’s second-division Phillies, notoriously the crudest bench-jockeys in baseball, chimed in. Says Rookie Robbie: “I’d get mad. But I’d never let them know it.” The Phillies management finally called down Chapman. He had his picture taken with Robinson to prove to everyone that the ugly reports weren’t true.

It was Robinson’s own Dodger mates who first came round. One or two of his fellow Dodgers began to say “Hello” to him in the locker room. Jackie wrote to his high-school baseball coach: “It isn’t too tough on me. I have played with white boys all my life. But they hadn’t played with a Negro before, and it sure was rough on some of them.” Soon he was invited to play cards on trips, but though he didn’t like the deuces-wild type of poker the boys played, he joined in a few games of hearts.

As Branch Rickey had foreseen, if Jackie played good baseball, the rest took care of itself. Some of the southerners on the squad shared the attitude of an Atlanta newsman who, when asked what he thought of Jackie Robinson, replied “He’s good, damn him.” But they were ready to back any player, black or white, who might help bring them the bonus (about $6,000 for winners, $4,000 for losers) that each gets for playing in a World Series.

After Slaughter did his spiking job a month ago, a group of Brooklyn players came to Jackie and said: “If they give you the works, give it back to them—and the team will be behind you 100%.” That was the day Jack Roosevelt Robinson won his long, patient battle.

* After Theodore, not Franklin.

* No kin.