WHITMAN – Monday, April 15 was much more than Tax Day and Marathon Monday – in Major League Baseball stadiums and ballparks it was the 20th anniversary of Jackie Robinson Day, celebrating the first time Robinson stepped on the grass at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, N.Y., – 57 years before that to officially integrate America’s game.
But was Robinson the first African-American to play professional baseball?
Ted Reinsten, a Chronicle reporter for WCVB-TV, and author of “Before Brooklyn: The Unsung Heroes Who Helped Break Baseball’s Color Barrier” says the answer is kind of yes and no.
In a bit of fortuitous timing, Reinstein appeared at Whitman Public Library on Saturday, April 12 to discuss his book. The program was sponsored by the Friends of the Whitman Public Library.
“Libraries need good friends,” he said. “And this library has some good friends.”
With the start of Major League Baseball’s season only two weeks before his talk, and “the Red Sox are already almost in last place,” the timing couldn’t have been too much better.
“It’s been said that time begins on Opening Day and I often feel that way,” Reinstein said. “You get a whole new shot with spring – with everything, not just baseball.
He began with a basic question to prove how a major part of the Jackie Robinson story is not really well-known – after he broke the color barrier in 1947, who was the second Black Major Lague ballplayer?
One person guessed Larry Dobey, but while he is part of the story, his name was not the correct answer
“I’ve never had anybody get the right guess,” he said. That’s because – spoiler alert – it was Jacke Robinson and the failed guesses often come from people who know baseball history.
“It’s a bit of a trick question,” he said. “The second Black ballplayer was Jackie Robinson because Jackie Robinson did not do the thing you think he did. – Jackie Robinson did not integrate Major League Baseball. He re-integrated it.”
More than 60 years before, a Negro player named Moses Fleetwood Walker.
“That tells us we’re missing out on a central fact of what Jackie Robinson did and, by missing out on the central fact that he re-inegrated baseball takes nothing away from [him]. Do you know the year of inhuman hell he went through when he was breaking the Color Barrier?”
Death threats against him and his family were a daily part of his life.
But what the Jackie Robinson story does take away is the notoriety of Walker, who was the first and others who followed him in the game.
“One of the things with this book I was interested in was getting at how we learn history,” he said. “One of the things about doing this book was to get at a way … something that often happens with history, which is we may learn an event … and we often think, ‘I know what that is, I know what that’s about,’ and very often there’s a lot more context to the story.”
Whether it is how it is learned or it’s just a question of life getting in the way, some of those lessons are forgotten.
“In this case, its really unfortunate, because this is a case where we’re talking about really, the first civil rights victory of the 20th Century and the creation of a hero known around the world in Jackie Robinson,” Reinstein said. “And yet, he didn’t do this by himself.”
Others laid the groundwork for it.
It is also a story of how, in the years following the Civil War, baseball itself was an outlier.
“It was integrated,” Reinstein said. “It looked a little more like America. … And Moses Fleetwood Walker was a transformational player.”
He was not only the first of his race to play professional baseball player, he was a catcher who transformed how the position was played – and is played to this day. Teams used the position of catcher to stick the worst players up to then – they were just something of a human backstop.
Walker was different.
“He was fast, he was a great fielder, he was what we would call in baseball today, a five-tool player – he could play all five facets of the game,” Reinstein said. “He could run, he could hit, he could hit with power, he could field his position and he had a great arm. The last time the Red Sox had a player like that was a fellow named Mookie Betts, who they promptly got rid of and they’ve been in the toilet ever since. But don’t get me started.”
Walker was so good, he was signed by a Major League Baseball team in 1884 by the Toledo Blue Stockings of the National League.
From a social standpoint, he had been born to parents who had been born into slavery and the country was still recovering from the Civil War, but his talent for baseball could not be ignored.
But his career was short-lived because of the racism of another Major Leaguer – Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson, the captain of the Chicago Cubs the time, and the first bona fide superstar of professional baseball.
“Cap Anson happened to be quite a vicious racist,” Reinstein said. “He was a bully and didn’t like the fact that his vaunted Cubs were starting the season against a team that fielded a Black ballplayer … [but] he used another word we don’t like to say.”
Anson played the game under protest and told Major League owners the Cubs would no longer take the field against any team that fielded a Black ballplayer. While the owners tried to ignore Anson, within two years, the owners had met and taken a secret meeting and vote and a majority decided there would be no more Black players signed and those already on teams could play out their contracts, but would not be resigned.
“The Color Barrier was now a reality,” Reinstein said.
In the years 1900-20, meanwhile, the Negro Leagues and barnstorming teams criss-crossing the country, often beat white Major Leaguers in exhibition games.
It would not be until after WWII, when the Black Press in America pressured that hypocrisy after Black soldiers, including those in units like the Tuskegee Airmen and the 761st Tank Battalion within Gen. George S. Patton’s III Army Corps fought heroically to defeat the racism of Nazi Germany. The 761st had once been commanded by –Jackie Robinson after an old knee injury kept him from going overseas with his men.
It was only a matter of the right owner finding the right player to withstand the racist taunts of fans and opposing players alike.
On April 15, 1947, it happened and Robinson strode to his position in the Ebbets Field outfield.
“Amid the din of cheering fans, and of exploding flashbulbs capturing it,” Reinstein wrote, “there were also two inaudible sounds – of a wall falling, and of cheering that could not be heard with the ear, only from the heart. It rose from those not present physically, but spiritually, those who could not be seen, but were there just the same.”
What made this a topic Reinstein wanted to pursue?
“Over time, I’m saying, ‘Who are these people?’” he said. “I think the part that was probably influential for me is that, even in my Chronicle work, I’ve always loved an underdog story. I mean, who doesn’t.”
This may have been one of the biggest underdog story out there.
While Ken Burns’ 1994 documentary “Baseball,” definitely primed the pump for some fans of the game to learn more about its history.
“[It] was the first time that a lot of people heard of who these people were,” he said.
What has been the most unusual question Reinstein gets on the book circuit about “Before Brooklyn?”
“It’s always neat and memorable when somebody asks me something that I had never been asked before,” he said, noting that this reported was only the second person to ask if he thought women would ever play Major League ball. He included a slide in his PowerPoint deck of Toni Stone, a Black woman who played for several men’s Negro League teams, including the Indianapolis Clowns after the first. “So much is trial and error with doing these talks,” he continued. “So many things are the result of somebody asking me something that I wasn’t prepared for.”
His next book, “Travels Through the Heart and Soul of New England,” is something he wanted to make sure he did while still at Chronicle, because it’s based on the most memorable people that I’ve met around New England, and I knew it would be easier to tackle it while he had access to the technology at the show.