Take Me Back to the Ballgame

This is the year in which baseball is effusively honoring the same man baseball blacklisted (or should we say whitelisted?) a generation ago. I refer to Jack Roosevelt Robinson of Cairo, Ga., Pasadena and Brooklyn. I have promised to comment on interleague play here and if you bear with me for a bit, you will see a connection between the extended Robinson phenomenon and the current cohabitation between the American and National leagues.

Robinson came into organized baseball because Branch Rickey, who ran the Dodgers in 1947, believed in economic integration. The risks were sizable: Boycotts by other clubs. A fistfight between Robinson and white players on the field, infecting the grandstands, infecting the city. A race riot. None of this happened but it surely might have.

Suppose, more simply, Robinson had turned out to be like Michael Jordan--a great athlete who couldn’t hit the curve. Imagine the headlines: “Dodgers Release Rookie Robinson; No Future Signings of Negroes Planned.”

As it turned out, Robinson pounded major league pitching, never lowered himself into a brawl, and with the support of Rickey, Pee Wee Reese and a few others, turned the Dodgers into the National League’s dominant team.

Did this help Major League Baseball? Integration was unimaginably vitalizing. Satchel Paige, Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Roy Campanella followed Robinson. When these Negro League stars burst before the public at large, baseball marched into a golden age. Did integration make money? The Dodgers and the Cleveland Indians broke attendance records in their first years of integration. Robinson quickly became the biggest box office draw, bigger than Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams or Stan Musial.

Then the law of diminishing returns asserted itself. Novelty faded. Baseball appointed inept commissioners, mishandled player relations, fumbled for a television policy. Today, integrated football and integrated basketball have charged up to and maybe passed integrated baseball.

Against this flood, baseball has tried changes. Perhaps the jury is still out on the designated hitter. Not here. This vote is a hearty “Nooooo!” I liked watching Koufax strike out. So did opposing hitters. Once in a great while--twice actually--Sandy hit a home run.

Other changes define disaster. It is widely accepted that plastic grass makes a better playing surface then poison ivy, but only slightly. Some multipurpose ball parks--the Seattle Kingdome and the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome--have become icons at the School of Ugly Architecture.

Now with a great buzz and drum rolls, interleague play is upon us. Moving roughly east to west, the New York subway series is a smash. Two sellouts at Yankee Stadium at this writing, two pretty good games and the newspapers gone hysterical. Is it the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees all over again? No, but the headlines are huge. “Subway to Heaven” cried the New York Post with such enthusiasm that I had to go all the way to Page 5 to learn that Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow now sleep separately.

The Braves-Orioles series in Atlanta was superb baseball. These are the two best teams extant, but I find myself faced with another question: If I’m watching the World Series in June, what will I be watching come October? A rerun. The World Series as a rerun. Gentlemen, please. Maybe, instead, I can tune to another channel to the Pitt-Paltrow reconciliation press conference.

A happy development from Chavez Ravine. The Dodgers and Angels played a nice game Tuesday night, the Dodgers winning in the bottom of the ninth. But fans were unwilling to be hyped. Dodger-Angel attendance: 41,428. Dodger attendance for a straight National League game June 11: 52,873. That was Beach Towel Night. Are the people of Los Angeles telling us that beach towels are more appealing than interleague play? Somebody oughta listen.

You see, what happened to that other experiment, integration, upset just about every club owner except Branch Rickey. They thought baseball was hiring a Negro who knew his place, was maybe a little afraid of ghosts, and under pressure would say “Yowsa, boss.” When the lords of baseball discovered that Jackie Robinson stood fierce, independent and even headstrong, they set about disposing of him as quickly as they could. From the time of Robinson’s retirement as a player in the fall of 1956 to his death in October 1972, nobody in baseball offered him a job.

Jack was a noble experiment too difficult to deal with until he was safely dead.

Interleague play? Well, it’s better than moving the pitcher’s mound back 40 feet to make hitting easier.

We’ll see. By the way, when is the next beach towel night?