King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Baseball's obsession with Jackie Robinson tributes has helped turn him from fiery activist to paper saint. Plus: 4-overtime NHL playoff opener.
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April 12, 2007 | Major League Baseball has a variety of events scheduled for Sunday to honor Jackie Robinson on the 60th anniversary of his 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, which broke baseball's color line.
In one of the stranger tributes, more than 150 players, including five whole teams, will wear Robinson's No. 42 Sunday. Ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Robinson's debut, commissioner Bud Selig announced that baseball was retiring his number, forbidding all players who weren't already wearing No. 42 from ever doing so.
So it's a tribute to Robinson to avoid wearing his number, and it's also a tribute to him to wear his number. I think that about covers it, don't you?
But here's a better question, and by asking it I don't mean to denigrate Robinson's contributions to baseball and to the wider culture, which were monumental: Is there a point at which we don't need any more tributes to Jackie Robinson?
Baseball seems to have made a cottage industry out of paying tribute to Robinson. Or maybe it's a fetish.
On the one hand, you almost can't pay too much tribute to Jackie Robinson. I get that. Just showing up, just being the first black player in the modern majors, carrying that standard, kicking down those barriers, putting up with levels of abuse and open hatred that are just about unfathomable in our hardly racially harmonious day and age, that would have made Robinson a towering figure.
To do all that and to also be Jackie Robinson, the baseball player, the Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, batting champ, two-time stolen base champ and six-time All-Star in a career that didn't even start until he was 28, that made him a colossus.
And not one who rested on his laurels. He remained active and angry between his retirement in 1956 and his death in 1972. Just before he died, he had to be cajoled into attending the World Series, which he'd intended to stay away from in protest of baseball's unconscionable lack of black managers.
That's not the Jackie Robinson Major League Baseball likes to talk about, the one who today would be loudly questioning why baseball isn't doing more to get more black faces on the field, in the stands, in front offices and in owners' suites.
The Jackie Robinson baseball pays tribute to with its silly numbers games is a paper saint. Here he is shaking hands with Branch Rickey. Here he is getting a hit, racing around the bases, stealing home. Here's his widow, Rachel Robinson, baseball's Coretta Scott King.