It’s been about six weeks now since I wrapped up my series on how baseball integrated after Jackie Robinson. Part of me hoped in that time I would have some epiphany condensing all those stories into a few clear lessons that could be applied to modern social movements. Of course, history is never as a simple as that, and my thoughts remain scattered. But there are still some takeaways that have stayed with me, and I think the period is instructive in many respects, and ought to be studied and thought about more deeply than it has. So I’m going to run through a few of the big themes I took away. Whether these are “lessons” or not, I’m not sure, but I think they’re at least useful to think about when considering how change happens.
1) Jackie Robinson is even more impressive than I realized.
I started the series by acknowledging that Jackie Robinson is one of the few figures in American history who is worthy of the Great Man status often bestowed on him, but I wanted to focus on players whose stories are told less often. Nevertheless, learning those stories made me truly appreciate what Robinson accomplished.
The problem is that his story is often told as an individual triumph, as one man overcoming enormous odds. When you take a broader look at Robinson’s peers, though, you really see the ugly realities contained in a phrase like “enormous odds.” Going through the guys who integrated other teams, you see how common it was for players in that position to break down mentally. Some, like Hank Thompson, turned to alcohol; some, like Tom Alston or Carlos Bernier, turned violent due to mental illness; and some, like Bob Trice, simply walked away from the game because they were unhappy.
Even players who succeeded, like Sam Jethroe and Elston Howard, were clearly held back. Either their career started too late, or they were thrust into roles that did not suit them, or they would feud with their teams. And all that was true for Robinson. He faced more scrutiny than any baseball player, probably ever. He didn’t debut until he was 28. He played out of position constantly. He clashed with Dodgers management frequently, especially after Branch Rickey left Brooklyn in 1950. And yet he put together an almost storybook career. He was a first-ballot Hall of Famer—and not the kind of “Hall of Famer” where you have to grade on a curve to account for his historical significance. His career WAR falls right between two other first-ballot Hall of Famers, Dave Winfield and Dennis Eckersley, despite playing in fewer than half as many games.
It is often suggested that Robinson was “special”—and indeed he was. He was one of the most talented athletes in American history, and he had a keen sense of his place in history. It’s also worth noting that Robinson benefited from institutional support, in the form of Rickey’s backing, that most players in this series lacked. But it’s important to remember that Robinson was not actually built in a lab to integrate baseball. He was, in many respects, just a guy, as were all the guys in this series who fell short. Like them, Robinson had outbursts, frustrations, untimely slumps, injuries, fights with teammates and managers, and all the other things that could derail a Black player’s fragile career back then. It’s not that Robinson behaved perfectly, even though that is sometimes how he is remembered.
What really makes Robinson newly impressive to me is that he was able to do exactly what history asked of him, while dealing with all the things that Sam Jethroe and Hank Thompson and Tom Alston and all the rest of them dealt with. One impetus for this series was trying to imagine what baseball’s history would have been like if Robinson had been merely OK. If he’d played for a few seasons, been a little better than league average, and washed out of the league. Or if he’d hung around as a backup, but never made an All-Star game or won an MVP. What level of success was enough to ensure that baseball’s great experiment not be deemed a failure? We don’t have to answer that question, because wherever you set the bar, Robinson cleared it. When you look at the careers of guys like Sam Jethroe, Hank Thompson, and Elston Howard—who all had the talent to be more successful than they ended up being—it is even more remarkable that Robinson cleared that bar so resoundingly.
2) The integration story is a class story.
I wrote about this a little in Part Five, when talking about Chuck Harmon and the Cincinnati Reds, namely that so many of the players who broke team color barriers were college graduates or military veterans. But it’s worth dwelling on exactly how those ideas relate to class. After all, neither of those facts has much to do with how one relates to the means of production. For Black Americans in the twentieth century, though, class was often about how they related to white people.
Obviously, this is still true, and a major part of how discussions of race and class get complicated. It was simply more explicit then—teams could say they wanted “the right kind” of player, and it was clear what they meant. It wasn’t about talent or the ability to play, but the kind of behavior that white people expected of Black people. Guys who’d been in the military, or attended college, could be counted on to know that. On the flip side, guys who played in Mexico or Canada or Cuba, where the racial caste system was system was different, were often avoided.
Nowadays, screening for a college education or other trappings of class is seen as a matter of substantive qualifications. You want someone who has the right credentials or sounds smart. But clearly a lot of what is going on is the same thing as baseball teams screening for a particular kind of Black person. There are so many jobs that require college degrees without actually requiring skills learned in college, in part because it is a way of screening for “the right kind” of person. It’s not exactly racial discrimination, although it may have effects similar to screens for criminal history. But plenty of firms or industries could theoretically end up with racially diverse staffs, while simultaneously only getting a particular type of racial minority—ones who have already demonstrated skills at navigating places dominated by white authority figures.
And baseball really shows the limitations of this kind of advancement. Because even as the game included Black players, it never really opened its power structure to racial minorities—as White Sox executive Kenny Williams pointed out at this year’s GM meetings. To this day, the game has never had many Black managers, Black GMs, Black owners, or Black executives. Ditto for Latinx or Asian-Americans. When you only integrate by including the upwardly mobile minorities—and when you create a racial caste system where minorities who threaten white interests have limited upward mobility—you effectively lock in the power of white elites. It’s yet another illustration of how race and class must always be considered together when trying to build a more egalitarian society.
3) Owners love to use competitiveness against workers.
Speaking of upward mobility, let’s talk about merit. A perennial excuse for owners to delay integrating was that they weren’t going to add a Black player just for the sake of adding a Black player—they would only do so if that player would help the team win. And they always framed this as doing Black people a huge favor. As Larry MacPhail wrote in his infamous letter defending segregation: “Signing a few negro players for the major leagues would be a gesture which would contribute little or nothing towards the solution of the basic problem. Any such program would be disadvantageous to the negro players and the negro fans.” His main reason was that Black players simply weren’t good enough, and so putting them on the field to prove a point wouldn’t be fair to them.
What makes this kind of thinking so frustrating is that there will always be someone you can point to as justification. The MLB was very competitive. Between the AL and NL, there were 16 teams, meaning only a few hundred roster spots for the entire country. No matter what the racial makeup of the leagues, you could always find some very talented players, of every race, who wouldn’t make the cut for whatever reason. At the same time, the skill difference between the worst player to make the team, and the best player to get cut, is subjective and inexact to the point of being almost imperceptible. So if you’re inclined to give the last spot to a white player over a Black one, you can probably find some baseball-related reason to do so. That’s what made early Black stars like Robinson, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, and Ernie Banks so important—they were so clearly over the line that owners could no longer maintain the fiction that there were no Black players good enough for the MLB.
But discriminating against guys closer to the cutoff was always easier. After all, in a competitive context like professional sports, who’s going to defend the mediocre? But, truthfully, mediocrity is where discrimination hurts the worst. You would think that teams would start integrating with stars like Robinson and Mays who were clearly over the line. In reality, stars like that were the exceptions among early integrators. So many of the Black players who broke team color lines were near the cutoff: bench players, utility guys, relief pitchers, etc.
I suspect this reflects the ambivalence of owners, as it was easy to give up on these players when they stalled. But how many of them could have stuck around a little longer in a fairer world? How many bench players could have emerged as starters if given enough time to develop? How many two-year careers should have been five-year careers, but for racist managers who made the cuts? It feels silly to even ask these questions, like you’re cheering for mediocrity, but that reluctance is exploited by the status quo.
Indeed, we see this same phenomenon at work in competitive industries today. Whenever anyone brings up the lack of diversity among federal judges, or newspaper editors, or Hollywood directors, the defense is always the same: We only want to hire the best PEOPLE, regardless of race or gender or sexuality. It would be insulting or demeaning to hire someone for their identity instead of their QUALIFICATIONS. But, of course, you can always fudge the qualifications. As the integration story shows, you can find some reason to claim racial discrimination is based on merit.
As I went through each team, I tried to point out not just their first Black player, but their first Black “star.” This was obviously a trickier thing to define. But what I was really trying to get at here was when teams gave up that initial reluctance to integrate—when they stopped dipping their toe in with a pinch-hitter or relief pitcher, and really put their team’s fate in the hands of a Black player. And for so many teams—besides the New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers, and Cleveland Indians—that gap was remarkably long. Most took years.
It is often thought that competition will tear down prejudice. That if discrimination is shown to make your baseball team (or your company, or your country) worse off, then people will give it up. That if members of a disadvantaged groups can prove they succeed on the merits, then the biases will fade away. The integration story is often held up as an example of this… but when you look deeper, at the actual resistance to integration in the face of overwhelming evidence that it helped teams, it almost proves the opposite.