Baseball must embrace Robinson’s spirit
As Major League Baseball awakens to a forever altered landscape in the wake of two days of player strikes to shine a light on racial injustice, there is no better time to re-think its celebration of a civil rights icon.
Since 1997, when Commissioner Bud Selig celebrated the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers debut, ending decades of exclusion for people of color in Major League Baseball, the league has wrapped itself in No. 42 the way a political figure might wrap him or herself in the flag. In this everunpredictable 2020, that celebration fell on Friday rather than the usual April 15, due to the coronavirus-inspired industry shutdown.
In positioning itself as a social institution, the league could place itself on the right side of history, integrating before the NBA, for one, and Robinson's role in the overall civil rights movement gave the sport a permanent thread within the nation's fabric.
But we all know what has been happening since.
The Black player population has been in free fall since the late 1970s, settling in at around 8% for the past decade. Managers, front offices and executive roles at the league's central office are nearly bereft of people of color. The game's revenues have boomed but its cultural currency has waned significantly, a disease that has dozens of symptoms but perhaps none greater than the difficulty in accessing a sport that seems to grow more expensive to play and watch.
MLB's efforts to grow the game and increase access come in good faith, but tangible gains remain elusive. Meanwhile, its embrace of Robinson only grows tighter, starting with the retirement of his No. 42 to having all players wear it on the standard April 15 anniversary to the various cut-and-paste social media platitudes celebrating the man.
All of it is well-intended, from the deeds to the dinero – such as the $420,000 the Miami Marlins pledged Friday to the Jackie Robinson Foundation to fund an annual scholarship, and the $3.5 million commitment MLB made in renewing its commitment to that organization. Yet now seems like an ideal time to move beyond the workshopped symbolism and toward a fuller, more organic embrace of Robinson's legacy.
This was a startling week for Major League Baseball.
Hundreds of its players – by tradition painfully staid and conservative in comportment and worldview – sat out to protest social injustice. As Black players expressed why they felt a desire to sit out, a handful of white allies – from Rhys Hoskins to Mike Yastrzemski to Brent Suter and many others – emerged.
To be sure, these actions had far from unanimous support. Ten teams – some partially driven by circumstance – have not yet participated in this strike.
But the action was radical by baseball standards and suggested at least a partial evolution that in some ways mirrored Robinson's.
His qualities most often celebrated are dignity and endurance, tolerance and courage. Yet at his core, Robinson was a radical, a complex individual who carried the confusion and pain of the actor in the arena of struggle.
Any activist today knows their message must be pitch-perfect and consistent, lest they be branded a hypocrite or asked by those in positions of power and privilege, “What exactly is it that you want?”
Robinson's views did not move in a linear fashion. His history is dotted with critiques of Black activist Paul Robeson for sympathizing with Russia or Martin Luther King Jr. for opposing the war in Vietnam, and even briefly pledging support for Richard Nixon's 1960 presidential bid.
But he eventually saw through the fog of his own war to disavow those viewpoints and take actions that we don't often hear about on the day he's celebrated.
The Jackie Robinson that baseball needs to know about lent his support to Olympic medalists John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who were exiled for protesting racism and the inclusion of South Africa in the 1968 games. The fuller view of Robinson includes a man who resigned from the NAACP board because he found it “unresponsive to the needs and aims of the black masses,” and who disavowed MLB in 1969 for failing to hire a Black manager, a barrier that would not be broken until Frank Robinson in 1975.
The Robinson we've magnified for feel-good truisms such as that a life “is not important except in the impact it has on other lives” has nearly erased the man who wrote that “in 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”
That sentiment is expressed in a video MLB released Friday, narrated by Mookie Betts and directed by Emmywinning Randy Wilkins. Interspersing clips of Robinson with modern players and recent protests, it would almost certainly meet Jackie's approval. Now, to educate the game's young. Since George Floyd's killing in May, we've heard a lot from ballplayers and managers about “having difficult conversations” in the clubhouse about racial injustice. Those were renewed this week after Kenosha, Wisconsin, police shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, leading to walkouts that began with Milwaukee's Bucks and Brewers and eventually spread to 20 major league teams.
And as Black players share their experiences with racial profiling and unfair policing, a theme has emerged from their white teammates: They had no idea.
That seems startling at first. Then, you consider that the average young, white ballplayer grew up in a time mistakenly labeled “post-racial,” as if having a Black president for up to a third of their lives papered over all inequities.
And then you consider the bubble of so many white ballplayers: From cul-desac or gated community to private instructor, travel ball team and then a college program or the minor leagues, with perhaps a handful of Black teammates along the way.
Meanwhile, those teammates are often the only Black players on their respective teams, isolated and disempowered to speak their truths. In many cases, until this week.
That should never be the case again. So while MLB celebrates Robinson, it needs to amplify every ounce of his story, and educate its youngest and most impressionable players from the time they enter the game, including the through line that exists to today's enduring structural injustices.
As players in every league noted this week, sitting out a handful of games won't erase police brutality, or systemic racism. And so those “difficult conversations” will still occur.
They can be a little easier in the future if the game presents a fuller picture of Robinson.