More Than Just a Game

EVEN IF you were alive then, it must be pretty difficult now to remember the way it was. And if you weren't, the whole idea sounds absurd and disgusting on its face. But at one time--and it was not a long time ago at that--major league baseball was like an exclusive white men's club.

As such, it bore all the proper trappings, Racism, to name one. Solidarity in the face of outside protest, to name another. Most notably, this club was marked by hypocrisy--in terms of the public stance that "standards" alone, not discrimination, were keeping the excluded Blacks out the door. "There is not a single Negro player with major league possibilities," the Sporting News editorialized at the end of the conspiracy in 1945, widely reflecting the views of the oligarchy of owners that controlled the game. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the imperious commissioner of baseball, took the role of frontman for the charade and declared, "Negroes are not banned from organized baseball...and have never been in the 21 years I have served." All this was barely 30 years ago, scarcely believable in an age when Blacks dot the league leaders' lists and all-star teams.

Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy tells the fascinating story of this transformation, how Blacks broke down the doors of the exclusive club that was major league baseball pre-1948. Starting with the segregation of the early 1900s, Jules Tygiel delves into the evolution of the Negro Leagues, ranges into the famous Robinson break-through with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and finishes up with a detailed a count of the ensuing full integration of the sport, and the bringing up of "Pumpsie" Green in 1959 to the Red Sox, the last bastion of lily whiteness.

The outlines of the Robinson story are, of course, familiar even to many a non-baseball fan, given the event's enormous symbolic importance. The exhaustive search by Branch Rickey, the Dodger president, for the "right" player to be the first to break baseball's color barrier; the extreme secrecy in which he shrouded his plans; the abuse Robinson had to suffer during his first years in the league--these themes have become cultural common knowledge in the wake of the wild publicity that accompanied him throughout his spectacular 1950s career. But Tygiel, a San Francisco State history professor, is able to expand upon pop wisdom, chronicling the story with an unusual degree of depth, historical perspective for the event, and passion for the subject.

Tygiel has interviewed dozens of participants in the drama and read voluminous newspaper accounts, and the effort shows. The relations between Rickey and Robinson, for example, so often portrayed as a paternalistic one, is showed to be for more complicated with Robinson more assertive than commonly believed. Tygiel depicts the complex web of loyalty and apprehension that bound Robinson to his white teammates, and how subsequence the slow crumbling of resistance to integration, as Rickey's experiment gained momentum. And he goes beyond the main themes of his story--noting, for example, the devastating effect that integration had on the once-flourishing Negro Leagues.

For Tygiel, the Robinson story is about more than just baseball; it's a precursor of the potent new force in American politics--the civil rights movement. His thesis is that baseball's integration process closely mirrored the integration process as a whole across the United States over the next two decades. More than that, integration in baseball had a direct effect, Tygiel argues, on the efforts to desegregate society in general--acting as part and parcel of the forces breaking down old Southern mores.

SUCH CONCLUSIONS are deceptively simple, and Tygiel throughout illuminates the less-known and leas obvious details of the transformation. He painstakingly shows how much the elements of baseball desegregation resembled those of the desegregation movements as a whole. These included, he notes, direct confrontation with Jim Crow; courage in the face of personal abuse; economic pressures to allow Blacks into the mainstream; and indignant newspaper editorials. Jackie Robinson's increased militance towards racism over the course of his career, Tygiel writes, reflected the general militancy the civil rights movement adopted over time.

It is even more difficult to conceive of all the ways--and Tygiel recounts many--in which baseball desegregation helped directly speed national efforts. Just consider the effect of teams bringing Blacks down to spring training. For Robinson's Dodgers, according to Tygiel, the tours through the South "challenged deeply entrenched Jim Crow traditions"--from the segregation on the trains players traveled in, the restaurants in which they ate, or the hotels where they slept. "We were paying our dues long before the civil rights marches," the great Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe told Tygiel proudly. "Martin Luther King told me, in my home one night. 'You'll never know what you and Jackie and Roy [Campanile] did to make it possible to do my job.'"

While Tygiel is convincing in substance, though, he sometimes gets bogged down in overwrought academic analysis and jargon. He has an irritating tendency to resuscitate his general premises and conclusions every 20 pages or so; maybe he's thinking of some tenure committee somewhere. The point that he weaves implicitly into the work is made clumsily explicit, with repeated statments that this or that action in baseball integration reflected some' rational trend. His twisted explanation, moreover, for why white players in the 1890s rejected interracial competition--that it was a reflection of the "culture of professionalism" emerging at the end of the 19th century in America--is an example of a number of instances where Tygiel would do well just to call people racist and be done with things. And he ought to be sentenced to bench duty for calling Pete Reiser a "colleague" of Robinson's on the Dodgers.

BUT IF TYGIEL takes himself too seriously on occasion, at least he does it with a good heart. Here is a man, you are certain soon into the book, who has been weaned on old piles of Sporting News and stickball in the night, and you are sure this important saga is safe in his understanding hands. A cherished period in baseball, for both those who can recall it from personal experience and those less fortunate who remember it only from the worn pages of the record books, is brought back to life. The roll-call of greats that parade through Tygiel's pages pay ample testament to the glory of those days: Rickey, Robinson, Reese, Durocher, Sukeforth, Campanella, Veeck, Mays, Aaron, Newcombe...At the very least, we are grateful to Tygiel for culling these names and others from scrapbooks and long-destroyed card collections. And at the most, Tygiel transforms a dramatic but simple tale into a complex metaphor for some of the driving forces of modern society. As he concludes:" ...if the vision of an integrated and equal society, free from racism and discrimination, which impelled Rickey and Robinson to launch their 'great experiment' remains unfulfilled, their efforts have brought it closer to reality."