Reinsdorf recalls the day he missed meeting Jackie Robinson

2nd of 3 parts

Jackie Robinson was the right man at the right time when he broke baseball's color barrier in 1947.

But, as Brooklyn Dodgers fan Jerry Reinsdorf pointed out, Brooklyn was the right place for it to happen.

He ought to know. He was at Ebbets Field for Robinson's first game.

On April 11, 1947, Robinson, who signed a major league contract the day before, was in the lineup at first base for an exhibition game against the hated Yankees in Brooklyn.

In the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Harold C. Burr wrote that in the Dodgers' 14-6 win, "The Black Meteor didn't get a hit among the 16 the Dodgers hammered to all sectors of the park. He did bat in three runs and got hold of a couple of balls - one of 'em a harmless foul deep into the left-field wing of the grandstand - and laid down a pretty sacrifice."

Burr continued, "It was after the game that the crowd outside the park put on an amazing demonstration. Jackie was mobbed by youthful autograph hunters. Hundreds of kids surrounded him and he literally had to fight his way through the press of admirers. Joe Louis never received such a reception."

One of the kids at Ebbets Field that day was the 11-year-old Reinsdorf.

"I went to the game at Ebbets Field when Robinson first wore the Dodger uniform. It was an exhibition game. It must have been spring vacation, but I was there."

The paid crowd was listed as more than 24,000, and some of the thunder surrounding the signing was muted by baseball Commissioner A.B. "Happy" Chandler's decision the day before to suspend Dodgers manager Leo Durocher for a year for "conduct detrimental to baseball."

Remembering the atmosphere surrounding Robinson's debut, Reinsdorf said, "I don't recall any oohs and aahs or anything like that. I don't recall talk among the adults about, 'Oh, the Dodgers have a Black player.' I don't think it was that big a deal in Brooklyn. We just wanted to know if he was going to be any good."

Brooklyn, he said, had a substantial Black population.

"We went to school with Black kids. We played in the playgrounds with them," Reinsdorf said.

Brooklyn's diversity made it easier for Dodgers president Branch Rickey to integrate his team there, rather than in St. Louis, where he had served as Cardinals general manager.

"There's no way he could have done it in St. Louis," Reinsdorf said. "It had to be in a place like Brooklyn. It had to be a northern city and it had to be a city that was a melting pot. That's what Brooklyn was.

"Brooklyn had a cross section of Blacks, whites, Jews, Catholics, Italians. It was the perfect place, because we were all used to getting along with people who were different than we were."

Brooklyn was also pennant hungry. Reinsdorf pointed out that in 1946, the Dodgers blew a 7½-game lead over the Cardinals, who tied the Dodgers and then beat them two straight games in a best-of-three playoff to reach the World Series.

"So 1947 comes around and the Dodgers were going to have two rookies. One was Jackie Robinson and the other was a third baseman named Spider Jorgensen. All I remember is that all we talked about was, 'Are these guys going to be good enough to get us over the hump? Are these guys going to be good enough for us to win the pennant and beat the Cardinals?' "

There wasn't a lot of talk, at least among his 11-year-old contemporaries, about the Dodgers having a Black player.

The first time the significance of it really hit him, he said, was when he was talking with a Black friend.

"We were talking once, and I said to him, 'Who's your favorite player?' And he looked at me like I was an idiot. And he said, 'Well, Jackie Robinson, of course.' "

Reinsdorf said Robinson wasn't the best player he ever saw. He was "the most exciting player I ever saw. He could hit a home run. He could steal a base. He could bunt.

"He was so daring on the bases. I don't know how many balks he caused when he was on third base. He would run halfway down the line and stop and go back. Joe Torre likes to say about Jackie Robinson you couldn't tag him out. If he was in a rundown, he would go back and forth and back and forth."

Reinsdorf fondly recalled seeing a picture of Robinson in a rundown chased by eight Philadelphia Phillies, from which Robinson extricated himself.

"He would hit a single to right field and take a huge turn around first base, tempting the right fielder to throw behind him. If the right fielder threw behind him, he was on second, and if the right fielder threw to second, he would go back to first."

He added, "To my mind, Jackie Robinson was the greatest athlete of the 20th century because of all the sports he played," referring to Robinson's talents in football, basketball and track and field as well as baseball. At UCLA, Robinson lettered in four sports.

"Baseball was not even his best sport. He was just a great all-around athlete," Reinsdorf said.

Reinsdorf said he never met Robinson, although he came close when he went to a game at Ebbets Field with a friend.

"It was sold out. We had general admission seats. And a guy comes by and he says to us, 'Would you two kids like to be on the 'Jackie Robinson Show?' ' We must have been 13, 14 years old at the time. And we thought we were pretty sophisticated. We knew he was just trying to get us to give up our seats.

"So we said no, we're not giving up our seats. Sometime later, before the game started, two kids walked by and they said, 'Hey, we were on the 'Jackie Robinson Show.' ' So we were so smart we screwed ourselves out of being on the 'Jackie Robinson Show.' I never got to meet Jackie."

• Next week: 1951 heartbreak, 1955 triumph, and a bitter loss.