Twins play-by-play guy Dick Bremer pretty much sticks to baseball, and in particular avoids controversial topics. I therefore pricked up my ears when, during the telecast on Jackie Robinson Day, he said he thought there was something about baseball's color line getting broken that isn't widely recognized. This turned out to be the impression a lot of people have that, once Robinson played for Brooklyn, the barrier was down and Black players began filling roster places on all the big league teams. According to Dick, this view, or assumption, is false. He didn't supply a ton of details—he was calling the game, too—but I just googled "first black player in mlb by team" and got referred to quite a helpful list in this Wikipedia article. No surprise, Dick's right.
Indeed it turns out that the pace of integration was slower than I'd imagined. Robinson played his first game for the Dodgers on April 15, 1947. In July of that season, two other teams, the Cleveland Indians and the St. Louis Browns (now the Orioles), had their first Black player take the field—Larry Doby and Hank Thompson, respectively. In the 1948 season, no new team had its first Black player, though it was Roy Campanella's rookie season with the Dodgers and Satchell Paige pitched for the Indians. The next year, 1949, was Monte Irvin's first year with the New York Giants. No other team had their first Black player that season. In 1950, one new team had their first Black player when Sam Jethroe played in the outfield for the Boston Braves. The next season only the White Sox joined the list of integrated teams. When the Giants called up Willie Mays in May of '51, he became their fourth Black player—only the Indians, with five, had had more. By this time, Jackie Robinson was a five-year veteran and ten of the sixteen teams had still never had a Black player. When I was born toward the end of the 1958 season, Robinson had been retired for a couple of years and no Black guy had ever played for the home team in Fenway Park.
So those are the facts justifying Dick's assertion. If he'd wanted to venture a controversial conclusion on Jackie Robinson Day, he might have suggested that, when the topic is race in America, we love to pat ourselves on the back for "the progress we've made" while keeping hidden how much resistance there has always been to every grudging forward step.
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