Radio: Hot-Stove League

Winterbound baseball fans pass the time in hot-stove-league discussions of ballplayers, batting and fielding averages and the prospects for the coming season. Last week in the Jackie Robinson Show (ABC, Sun. 10:30 p.m., E.S.T.), they found a fact-filled radio capsule to help them through the dull months.

Husky (6 ft., 190 Ibs.), prematurely grey Jackie Robinson, slugging second baseman of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the National League’s most valuable player for 1949, served up a Louella Parsons-style program containing some gossipy nuggets. Examples: Eddie Waitkus, shot last summer by a love-crazed girl in Chicago, says he’ll be in the Phillies’ opening day lineup; the Yankees’ Tommy Henrich is happier at first base than in the outfield, because in right field he “used to get so weary chasing pitchers’ mistakes.”

Writing his show in collaboration with Harold Parrott, onetime sportwriter (Brooklyn Eagle) and now traveling secretary of the Dodgers, Robinson says, “We have the contacts to get the information. That’s where we have a break on the others.” In his first program he gave his fans nothing that they could not have read in the sport pages, but he hopes to turn up two or three “exclusive” items each week. Despite the lateness of the broadcast hour, at least one item on every show will be aimed “directly at kids,” who are the primary target of youth-minded Jackie Robinson. Each show will end on a nonsports note. Sample: “In order to love your own country, it isn’t necessary to hate others.”

The first “recognized”* Negro to play in major-league ball, Infielder Robinson is an experienced worker at the mike. Last year he did a six-day-a-week local show over Manhattan’s WMCA and, during the World Series, appeared after every game on Sportwriter Bill Corum’s radio and TV show. But his network program over 220 ABC stations last week brought some surprises. The biggest was the discovery that of the first six stations to grab the show for local sponsorship, five were in the South: Mobile, Ala., Gastonia, N.C., Lynchburg, Va., Jackson, Tenn. and Hattiesburg, Miss. “I don’t quite understand that,” says Robinson, “but I sure approve.”

* Reputedly others had played before him, labeled as Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc.