Baseball
The National Pastime
Inning Six, The National Pastime, covers the 1940s.
From
Baseball
The National Pastime
Episode 6 | 2h 29m 35sVideo has Closed Captions
Inning Six, The National Pastime, covers the 1940s.
Inning Six, The National Pastime, covers the 1940s and includes Joe DiMaggio's celebrated hitting streak, the awe-inspiring performance of Ted Williams and what Burns calls "baseball's finest moment" — the debut of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
From
Funding Provided By: General Motors Corporation; The National Endowment for the Humanities; The Pew Charitable Trusts; The Corporation for Public Broadcasting; The Public Broadcasting Service; Arthur Vining Davis Foundations
Baseball
The National Pastime
Episode 6 | 2h 29m 35sVideo has Closed Captions
Inning Six, The National Pastime, covers the 1940s and includes Joe DiMaggio's celebrated hitting streak, the awe-inspiring performance of Ted Williams and what Burns calls "baseball's finest moment" — the debut of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
From
How to Watch Baseball
Baseball is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Buy Now
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipANNOUNCER: CORPORATE FUNDING FOR THE ORIGINAL PRODUCTION OF "BASEBALL" WAS PROVIDED BY GENERAL MOTORS.
MAJOR FUNDING WAS PROVIDED BY THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES-- EXPLORING THE HUMAN ENDEAVOR; THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS, DRIVEN BY THE POWER OF KNOWLEDGE TO SOLVE TODAY'S MOST CHALLENGING PROBLEMS; THE ARTHUR VINING DAVIS FOUNDATIONS, INVESTING IN OUR COMMON FUTURE; BY THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING AND BY CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS PBS STATION FROM VIEWERS LIKE YOU.
THANK YOU.
ANNOUNCER: FOR WELL OVER A CENTURY NOW, BASEBALL HAS BEEN HELPING BOND PARENTS AND CHILDREN, UNITE COMMUNITIES, CLOSE GENERATION GAPS, OVERCOME LANGUAGE BARRIERS, SEAL FRIENDSHIPS, PATCH UP DIFFERENCES, AND INSTILL CIVIC PRIDE.
BANK OF AMERICA IS PROUD TO SUPPORT "KEN BURNS' BASEBALL" FULLY RESTORED IN HIGH DEFINITION AND HELP TELL THE STORY OF AMERICA THROUGH THE STORIES OF OUR NATIONAL PASTIME.
[ Bombs exploding ] [ Vehicle approaching ] -What's the password?
-Texas.
Keep 'em covered.
They may be German.
-Any line on these woods, major?
-I didn't hear the countersign.
-Oh.
Leaguer.
Texas leaguer.
-Will this road take us to 3rd Bat headquarters?
-Straight ahead.
-Get going.
-Just a minute.
What is a Texas leaguer, major?
-How's that?
-I said, what's a Texas leaguer?
-It's some kind of baseball term.
-What kind?
-A safe hit just over the head of the infielder.
-Nobody asked you.
How'd the Dodgers make out this year?
-Hey, who's your commanding officer, soldier?
-Whoever he is, he knows how the Dodgers made out.
Let's see your dog tags.
-What?
-Come on!
We're not taking any chances.
-Sprechen sie deutsch!
-Hey, what is this?
-Was ist dein name?
-What kind of nonsense -- -Schnell!
Schnell!
Name!
Sprechen sie!
-Drop those rifles!
-You -- who's the Dragon Lady?
-She's in "Terry and the Pirates."
-What's a hot rod?
-A hopped-up jalopy.
-Hello, Joe.
What d'ya know?
-Just got back from a vaudeville show.
I guess they're okay.
-Thank you, Sergeant.
-P.F.C., major.
"Praying for civilian."
That's why I believe in being careful.
And may I suggest, sir, that you study up on baseball.
-I guess I'd better.
[ Laughter, engine starts ] -When I was in the Army... -Let's go.
-...I was lonesome.
I missed baseball.
It was the World Series.
I went to a PX to listen to a World Series game on the radio.
And I was sitting there feeling a long way away from home -- hot climate, no sense of autumn, the Fall Classic.
And an old sergeant came in.
He was sitting down in front of me and he took out a cigar and lit it, and that cigar smoke drifted back into my face.
[ Laughing ] And I could smell the Polo Grounds and I felt at home.
It smelled.
It smelled of urine, it smelled of cigar smoke, it smelled of stale popcorn, but it was my place.
[ "The Star-Spangled Banner" playing ] ♪♪♪ -Play ball!
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ [ Up-beat jazz playing ] ♪♪♪ -Between 1940 and 1950, penicillin was introduced and the atom was split.
Orson Welles made his masterpiece, "Citizen Kane."
Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!"
opened on Broadway.
And Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president a third time and a fourth.
Overshadowing everything was a world war that would cost more than 55 million lives.
Walter Johnson and Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers died.
Nolan Ryan and Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose were born.
-Passeau pitches.
Williams swings.
-Before America joined the war, baseball had a summer better than anyone could ever remember.
Almost overnight, the hapless Brooklyn Dodgers became a force to be reckoned with.
And for the first time, women got a chance to prove that they, too, could play professional baseball.
[ Bat cracks, crowd applauds ] From the beginning, the major leagues were seen as a way up and out for poor but talented boys from sandlots and small towns and city streets, and its stars had included the sons and grandsons of immigrants from almost everywhere.
Always, it had been a white man's game.
Now, in Brooklyn, two extraordinary men would collaborate to change the game forever.
On April 15, 1947, Major League Baseball finally became in truth what it had always claimed to be -- the national pastime.
[ Bat cracks, crowd cheers ] ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -I would pick an eccentric player to epitomize baseball, and I'd pick Ted Williams.
I'd pick Ted Williams because of the absolute perfection of the swing.
I love to see that.
I can play that in my mind over and over again -- that lanky body twisted around itself, almost like a barber's pole revolving, and the intelligence and concentration with which he waited for the pitch and then performed about it.
Obviously, he could slow down the motion.
Because he was so learned, because his eyes were so good, because his reactions were so quick, he could slow it down and do what he wanted with it.
If there's one image that dominates all my recollections, it's Williams at the plate.
-"No use throwing at him.
First of all, you're not gonna hit him.
And second of all, you're not gonna bother him.
Best thing to do with him was to let him do what he was gonna do anyway and then concentrate on getting the next man out."
Paul Richards.
[ Crowd cheering ] ♪♪♪ -Back in the spring of 1939, a tall, thin, high-strung right fielder had broken in with the Boston Red Sox.
His name was Theodore Samuel Williams.
He insisted that the press call him "The Kid."
[ Bat cracks ] He went on to bat .327 for the year, hit 31 home runs, and knock in 145 runs -- the greatest rookie batting performance in baseball history.
He was born in San Diego, California, the son of parents so neglectful that he would later refuse to visit them, and he began attracting professional scouts while still in high school.
At 17, he started playing for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League, did poorly his first season, spectacularly his second, still better in his third.
The Red Sox signed him at 19.
He thought, talked, breathed hitting, squeezed a rubber ball ceaselessly to strengthen his grip, refused to drink anything stronger than a milkshake for fear of dulling his skills, made a scientific study of bats and discovered that it was speed, not weight, that made the difference.
"No one could throw a fast ball past me," Williams once said.
"God could come down from heaven, and he couldn't throw it past me."
His fellow outfielders complained that he was uninterested in anything but hitting.
Williams was unmoved.
"Tell them," he said, "I'm going to make more money in this game than all of them put together."
-I used to see a falling star go down when I was 14, 15, and I said -- There's two things I wished -- money, money, money, money, or the best hitter I could ever be, the best hitter there ever was and all that stuff -- as that falling star was coming down.
Now, this is no baloney.
This was when I was 13, 14, and 15, so it was back during that time that I was conceiving myself as maybe, boy, as good a hitter as there was.
And then, of course, I got a little more heavily involved in my thinking and said -- Boom!
"Best hitter that ever lived."
[ "Hail to the Chief" plays ] ♪♪♪ -On Opening Day 1941, Franklin Roosevelt threw out the first ball.
It was, he said, his ninth year in the majors.
By then, much of the world was already at war, and Americans feared that they, too, would soon be drawn into the conflict.
[ Bat cracks, people cheer ] The doings of the Vicksburg Hill Billies and Sioux Falls Canaries, the Uniontown Coal Barons and Sweetwater Swatters seemed less important somehow.
-In 1941, Hitler had all of Europe in control by now.
He had routed France in 1940 and he'd gone on to do everything.
In the beginning of '41, he'd wiped out the Balkans.
England was just staggering.
And at the end of May, Franklin Roosevelt made a speech, and a lot of people thought he was gonna declare war.
-Therefore, I have tonight issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists... -At the Polo Grounds, after the seventh inning, the umpires waved their hands the way they would if it had been raining, and they called time, and the players came off the field.
And the loudspeakers came on, and they broadcast Roosevelt's speech for 45 minutes to the people in the Polo Grounds.
And they just sat there listening to this incredibly important speech where Roosevelt brought our country as close to war as he could without actually declaring war.
-We will not hesitate to use our armed forces to repel attack.
♪♪♪ -Despite the growing threat of war, it was a great baseball summer, a summer of heroes.
-"He was a guy who knew that he was the greatest baseball player in America.
And he was proud of it.
He knew what the press, the fans, and the kids expected and he was always trying to live up to that image.
He knew he was Joe DiMaggio, and he knew what that meant to the country."
Lefty Grove.
-DiMaggio, as a ballplayer, was very difficult to know.
He was a loner.
He said very, very little.
You don't find many quotes in the papers of DiMaggio's playing days, because he didn't say very much.
He just performed.
But he was the leader.
He was the bell cow.
And when DiMaggio was playing, the Yankees just felt that they had it in the bank.
-He was a nonpareil ballplayer.
The people who played with him said even though DiMaggio would steal four, five, eight bases a year, that he was the best base runner of is time, too.
He just didn't need to steal bases, so why bother?
He didn't need to look as if he were crashing into walls, so why not glide to the walls instead?
And, of course, that swing, that immaculate swing -- it was the most beautiful of his epoch.
-Yankee center fielder Joe DiMaggio was something new in baseball -- a superstar who was also of Italian descent, an immigrant fisherman's son from San Francisco.
Writers and teammates weren't sure what to make of him.
He was so protective of his privacy, a friend said, that he led the league in room service.
Like Lou Gehrig, he was the mirror opposite of Babe Ruth, but he shared Ruth's determination to excel.
A teammate once asked him late in his career, when he was often in pain, why he played so hard.
"Because," he said, "there might be somebody out there who's never seen me play before."
His nickname was Joltin' Joe, but in fact, he made everything look effortless.
An opposing pitcher admitted that DiMaggio had only one weakness -- a weakness for doubles.
-In 1941, DiMaggio was only about 26 years old.
He'd been in the major leagues for five years, but he was not yet DiMaggio the god.
He was just a young ballplayer, and he wasn't terribly popular.
He had succeeded, you know, Ruth and Gehrig.
Ruth was still alive, Gehrig was dying, and here was this new guy.
He wasn't popular because he held out.
He wanted more money, as players do today and players did then, and he'd miss the beginnings of the season.
He was booed.
DiMaggio was booed.
But in '41, that changed when he started to get the hits.
And he just did it so terrifically, just sustaining it so that all the love turned around and came towards DiMaggio.
-On May 15, 1941, at Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio hit a single off White Sox pitcher Edgar Smith.
Though no one knew it, it was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary batting performances in baseball history.
He hit safely in 10 games in a row, then in 20.
By June 10th, he had hit in 25 straight games, tying Babe Ruth's old Yankee record.
On June 12th, he broke it with a double off Bob Feller.
♪♪♪ Three seemingly insurmountable records loomed ahead of him -- Rogers Hornsby's modern National League record of 33 consecutive games, George Sisler's American League record of 41 games, and Wee Willie Keeler's all-time major league record of 44, set back in 1897.
On June 21st, he reached 34, outdistancing Hornsby.
Pitchers refused to walk him.
"It wouldn't have been fair," one said, "to him or to me.
He is the greatest player I ever saw."
"DiMaggio even looks good striking out," Red Sox slugger Ted Williams said.
He didn't do that very often.
During the entire 1941 season, DiMaggio struck out just 13 times.
♪♪♪ On June 26th, it almost came to an end.
He went hitless in his first three times at bat.
With two outs in the eighth, DiMaggio finally smashed a double to left, extending his streak to 38.
George Sisler's record was next.
-Meanwhile, Joe DiMaggio holds up baseball's glory.
The New York Yankees outfielder goes to bat against Washington with a consecutive hitting streak of 40 games.
A safety will tie a 19-year-old modern record.
And on his third try... DiMaggio comes through.
A screaming two-bagger equals George Sisler's mark for hitting in 41 straight games.
And 31,000 local Washington fans forget partisanship to salute Joe DiMaggio.
A doubleheader today, and DiMaggio rests between games while baseball drama builds.
Cameras are ready, and the crowd's almost hushed.
Joe has gone hitless three times in the second game.
Now here's the hit that makes it 42 games in a row for Joltin' Joe!
And everybody's relieved.
Everybody has a pat on the back for baseball's slugging star.
Even the umpire.
Watch him.
As a team, the Yankees also boast a home-run streak, but they're happiest over DiMaggio's great record.
The kid from San Francisco's Fishermen's Wharf has come a long way, but this is his biggest moment.
♪♪♪ -But afterwards, someone stole his favorite bat.
"I had sandpapered the handle to take off 3/4 ounce," he said.
"It was just right."
Now he borrowed a bat from a teammate and went on hitting.
Only Keeler's record, just two games away, remained to be broken.
[ Bat cracks, crowd cheers ] -July 2nd, New York Herald Tribune.
"Joe DiMaggio reached into his private stock of ammunition yesterday at Yankee Stadium, reloaded his bat, and tied the all-time major league record for hitting in consecutive games."
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -At Yankee Stadium on July 2nd, he hit a three-run homer that soared over the head of Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams to move past Keeler.
Now every game added to the record.
♪♪♪ -And it just kept going and going, and it just got into everybody in the country, people who weren't really interested in baseball.
A friend of mine, Andy Crighton, was driving across country with three friends, they were just out of high school, in a jalopy, and they got to a town in eastern Montana.
And I guess they camped outside of town.
They go into a coffee shop for breakfast, and Andy said in the coffee shop -- dusty place, ranchers, ranch hands and farm hands would come in.
In those days, you didn't get much news.
There wasn't any television.
You got some news from radio, but most of the news was in newspapers.
And these ranch hands would come in, they'd look over at the counter where the proprietor had a copy of the daily paper, and they'd just say, "Did he get one yesterday?"
Didn't have to say who it was, didn't have to say what it was.
Just, "Did he get one yesterday?"
And this was the question all summer in '41 -- "Did he get one yesterday?"
And when he did, it was such a sense of gratification.
And I think it was, you know, that "we" did that -- you know, one of our boys.
[ Laughs ] You know, one of the human race did this marvelous thing.
And it just meant so much.
It just kept us going and sustained us.
It was such an exciting year.
They started singing that song -- ♪ Joe, Joe DiMaggio ♪ ♪ We want you on our side ♪ Everybody wanted him on our side.
[ Laughs ] -On July 5th, DiMaggio hit in his 46th straight game -- another home run -- and got his stolen bat back.
A boy named Jimmy Ceres of Newark, New Jersey, had spent five days tracking it down.
-♪ Hello, Joe, what d'ya know?
♪ -♪ We need a hit, so here I go ♪ -♪ Ball one, yay!
♪ -♪ Ball two, yay!
♪ -♪ Strike one, boo!
♪ -♪ Strike two, boo!
♪ [ Drum tap, whistle ] -[ Cheering ] -On July 9th, DiMaggio hit a double in the All-Star Game, but that one didn't officially count.
-♪ He started baseball's famous streak ♪ ♪ That's got us all aglow ♪ ♪ He's just a man and not a freak ♪ ♪ Joltin' Joe DiMaggio ♪ -♪ Joe, Joe DiMaggio ♪ ♪ We want you on our side ♪ -♪ He tied the mark at 44 ♪ ♪ July the 1st, you know ♪ ♪ Since then, he's hit a good 12 more ♪ ♪ Joltin' Joe DiMaggio ♪ -♪ Joe, Joe DiMaggio ♪ ♪ We want you on our side ♪ -♪ From coast to coast, that's all you'll hear ♪ ♪ Of Joe, the one-man show ♪ ♪ Our kids will tell their kids his name ♪ ♪ Joltin' Joe DiMaggio ♪ -♪ We dream of Joey with the light brown bat ♪ ♪ Joe, Joe DiMaggio ♪ -♪ We want you on our side ♪ ♪♪♪ -Hey, Joe!
-In Cincinnati, Ohio, a history class voted him the greatest American of all time, ahead of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
[ Drum tap, whistle ] DiMaggio never lost his composure, though he smoked pack after pack of cigarettes and suffered from ulcers and insomnia.
"I was able to control myself," he later admitted, "but that doesn't mean I wasn't dying inside."
A sellout crowd filled Cleveland's Municipal Stadium on the evening of July 17th.
Al Smith, a veteran left-hander, started for the Indians.
[ Bat cracks ] Twice, DiMaggio hit hard grounders off him.
Twice, the Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner snuffed them out.
-...keep his 56-game hitting streak alive... -In the eighth inning, DiMaggio came to bat again with the bases loaded, against Jim Bagby, and hit still another hard grounder.
This time, it was caught by the shortstop, Lou Boudreau.
-Joe's hitting streak just stopped.
-New York won the game 4-3, but DiMaggio's streak had ended at 56 games.
No one has ever come anywhere near that record since.
-♪ And now they speak in whispers low ♪ ♪ Of how they stopped our Joe ♪ ♪ One night in Cleveland, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Goodbye streak, DiMaggio ♪ -DiMaggio left the park with his teammate, shortstop Phil Rizzuto.
"Do you know," he said, "if I got a hit tonight, I would have made $10,000?
The Heinz 57 people were following me."
-If you work out the stats, no one should ever have had a hitting streak anywheres near that long.
And the next biggest is the 44 that Pete Rose and Willie Keeler did.
And there's a big difference between 44 and 56 games.
That's an amazing statistic, because, remember, season statistics -- you can slouch for a while, you can have a slump.
But a hitting streak is consistency.
You got to get a hit every single day for 56 games.
It's an astounding figure.
-Between May 15th and July 16th, Joe DiMaggio amassed 56 singles, 16 doubles, four triples, and 15 home runs.
The day after his streak ended, he started a new streak.
He would hit safely in the next 16 games.
When that streak ended, DiMaggio had hit safely in 72 of 73 games.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -There's a story told of a fanatical Red Sox fan.
You know, all his life, he dreams, eats, sleeps baseball.
Finally, this righteous man says to him, "Is there nothing more important than baseball?
Suppose this boat we're in right now, the rowboat, were sinking and you could save only one.
Your father's on the boat, and Ted Williams.
Whom would you save?"
The man looks at him and says, "Are you crazy?
My father can't even bat .200."
-In the morning solitude of the clubhouse, long before game time, Ted selects his favorite model -- a 35-inch bat weighing 34 ounces, with precision balance, buggy-whip snap, and a trout-rod feel.
The center of percussion in a bat is in the joy zone, a 7-inch area in the symmetric barrel.
To solidify the barrel, the bat is boned.
A well-boned bat will not check or break in hot weather.
The joy zone becomes iron-hard and rings with a musical click when it meets the ball.
To prevent the bat from escaping from his hand, Ted grooves the handle with a bottle cap.
This produces hand security, for, at contact, his bat has generated rocket speed.
-In late July 1941, with DiMaggio's streak over, the spotlight shifted to the cocky young outfielder for the Boston Red Sox.
[ Bat cracks, crowd cheers ] Williams' obsession with hitting was admired, but he was not loved the way the exuberant Ruth had been, the way the shy DiMaggio was.
He feuded with the press, lined baseballs at fans who jeered him, and once was fined $5,000 for spitting at them.
-Now I look back and I think, well, I didn't handle it very well, I don't think the Red Sox handled it very well, and certainly, the press made it pretty tough for me.
And so, I think all of that is kind of silly as you look back, but it happened and it had quite an effect on me.
And sometimes I wonder if it didn't have a good effect, because I was mad at the world and mad at everybody.
And I'd go to the plate more determined than ever.
-After hearing boos from the crowd in his rookie year, he vowed never again to tip his cap after hitting a home run, no matter how loud the cheers.
Ted Williams owed them nothing but hits.
-In '41, Williams was tall, thin, gawky.
He had nicknames -- the Splendid Splinter, Toothpick Ted, you know, things like that.
He was an awkward-looking ballplayer.
He couldn't field.
I mean, he could catch a ball, but he was an awkward fielder.
Had a good arm from the outfield 'cause he used to pitch, but he was not a good fielder.
He was distracted in the outfield.
He'd stand in the outfield swinging an imaginary bat instead of looking at home plate.
Sometimes in '41, and 1940 in particular, he sometimes wouldn't run out ground balls, he wouldn't run out pop flies, and the crowd would boo him and Cronin would have to yell at him.
In 1941, Williams was considered a flake.
They didn't use the term then, but that's what he was.
And he was considered a very fine hitter, but not yet a great ballplayer.
And '41 was the making of Ted Williams -- the hitting streak, the home run in the All-Star Game.
-Passeau pitches.
Williams swings.
There's a high drive going deep, deep.
It is a home run, against the tip-top of the right-field fence.
A tremendous home run that brought in three runs and turned what looked to be a National League win into an American League 7-5 win.
Two men were on, two men were out, and what a wallop.
Williams just let go and hit one of the biggest home runs that's ever been hit at this park.
And how things change.
[ Bat cracks ] -Although he had broken his ankle in spring training, he had a 23-game hitting streak of his own that year, and he was batting 70 points higher than DiMaggio, well over .400 -- something no other ballplayer had done since 1930.
For the next two months, Williams dominated the league.
-♪ If I pitch, can you catch?
♪ ♪ Will you hold the ball?
♪ ♪ When you step to the plate ♪ ♪ Will you swing and fall?
♪ ♪ If you play, you gotta know how it's done ♪ ♪ Can you catch?
Can you hold a hard ball?
♪ ♪ Get your bat ready, baby ♪ ♪ Get your bat ready, baby ♪ ♪ Get your bat ready, baby ♪ ♪ Get your bat ready, baby, let's have some fun ♪ ♪ If you can hit that wall, you can make a home run ♪ ♪♪♪ -But as the season progressed, my average was hanging up at .410, .412, .415, and that started to get a little notoriety.
And of course, a lot of guys get into these streaks and nobody takes notice till maybe the last three weeks.
Now, you know, this guy's got a chance.
And so that's when I started to feel a little bit of pressure on this thing.
-Toward the end of the season, Williams' average began to drop.
-It was so dramatic.
His average had been dipping slowly -- .410, .408, .406.
They left Boston for the last week of the season, went to Washington, and Ted had a bad doubleheader and his average dropped to .401.
They had three games left in Philadelphia -- one on a Saturday and a doubleheader on Sunday.
And the Boston papers started talking about whether they should sit Williams down, let him sit out, hold his .401 average.
And Joe Cronin, the Boston manager, said to Williams, "Why don't you sit down?
Why don't you keep this?"
And Williams, to his tremendous credit, said, "No, no.
It's not a record unless you play all the way."
So he insisted on playing.
On Saturday, I think he went one for four, and his average dropped to .3995, .39955 -- just under .400.
It would round off to .400, the way baseball does things, but it wouldn't have been.
People all through the years would have said, "Well, he hit .39955," so he really had no choice but to play the last game.
-And I walked all over Philadelphia with Johnny Orlando that night, talking about what I had to do, worried about whether or not I could do it, hopefully I was gonna be able to do it, and talking over the pitchers I was gonna have to face the next day.
Probably so tired going into the park that I was relaxed.
-Again, Joe Cronin suggested that he sit out the games rather than risk damaging that record.
-Not ever.
Not -- Never a thought.
And I was even surprised when Cronin, that very day, came up to me the last day and he said, "You know, you don't have to play today."
And I said, "Hell, I'm gonna play."
You know, just like, "What's this, what's going on here?"
-"If I couldn't hit .400 all the way," he said later, "I didn't deserve it."
-I got ready to hit, and Hayes, just as he's kneeling down to give the signs and I'm up there to hit, he said, "Mr. Mack told us to pitch to you today."
And, boy, they didn't pitch very much to me, 'cause they knew I'd hit them so well.
Said, "Mr. Mack says we're gonna pitch to you today, but we're not gonna give you anything."
So, just before the pitcher was ready to throw the first pitch, Bill McGowan, he -- like all umpires -- they turn their rear end towards center field and brush off the plate.
And he said, "In order to hit .400, you gotta be loose."
And I'll never forget that.
-And so, here was the thing -- could he get his average up?
He got a base hit the first time up.
He hit a home run the second time up.
He got a base hit the third time up.
He got six hits in eight at-bats in the doubleheader.
After the third hit, he had it locked up.
He wasn't gonna go below .400 no matter what happened.
And Cronin, who had been around the major leagues for 20 years or so, said...
He said, "I came as close to crying on a ball field as I ever did when that kid got that third hit."
He said, "After all he went through."
-♪ Get your bat ready, baby ♪ -Ted Williams had raised his batting average to .406.
-♪ Get your bat ready, baby ♪ -No one has hit .400 since.
-♪ Let's have some fun ♪ ♪ If you can hit that ball, you can make a home run ♪ ♪♪♪ [ Bat cracks ] ♪♪♪ -Sparked by DiMaggio's streak, the New York Yankees clinched the pennant early in 1941, then braced for their first Subway Series with the National League's improbable champions, the Brooklyn Dodgers -- "Dem Bums."
-In 1941, along with Williams and DiMaggio, the real excitement of the season was in the National League.
The Brooklyn Dodgers had been a terrible team for 20 years.
They had a couple spurts.
Most of the time, they were a sixth-place team.
Terrible team.
And their front office was in disarray.
1938, they brought in Larry MacPhail, this dynamic man from the middle West -- loud, pugnacious, ideas, drank a lot, got in trouble, punched sports writers, all this sort of stuff.
But MacPhail was smart, and he hired people.
In '39, he hired Leo Durocher to manage this team.
Meantime, MacPhail was buying and selling ballplayers right and left, trying to put the team together.
In '39, the Dodgers finished third, and it seemed like a miracle.
They come up to the last week of the season to do this and excited everyone.
-Dodger General Manager Larry MacPhail was a great promoter and an impossible man -- belligerent, unsteady, alcoholic.
"With no drinks, he was brilliant," a sportswriter recalled.
"With one, he was a genius.
With two, he was insane.
And rarely did he stop at one."
MacPhail's new manager was his equally combative shortstop, Leo Durocher.
A former pool hustler, Durocher meant it when he suggested that nice guys finish last.
"Leo Durocher," one critic said, "is a man with an infinite capacity for making a bad situation worse."
Even Durocher's admirers called him "Leo the Lip."
-Talk about your sieve infield.
I got one here.
How's that?
Did you get that?
It was a dandy if it had stuck in your glove!
Try it again!
Oh, those big hops!
You always get those big hops!
The sandlot wonder!
-Durocher and MacPhail had a love/hate relationship.
Durocher said, "I guess MacPhail fired me 100 times."
And then hired him right back again.
But they suited Ebbets Field, they suited the borough of Brooklyn.
They worked very well together.
-Together, MacPhail and Durocher scoured the country for likely prospects -- castoffs, veterans, rookies.
It didn't matter so long as they helped bring home a pennant.
MacPhail bought veteran home-run hitter Dolf Camilli for $50,000 and paid $75,000 for a still-untried shortstop from Louisville named Pee Wee Reese -- a sum so large that Dodger investors questioned MacPhail's sanity.
But he also got rookie Pete Reiser, who soon became league batting champion, from the minors for just $100.
And he harvested old hands discarded by other teams -- Billy Herman, Joe Medwick, Dixie Walker.
And he coaxed fine pitching from Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons, Whitlow Wyatt, Kirby Higbe, and reliever Hugh Casey.
By the time he was finished, MacPhail had somehow put together a winning team.
♪♪♪ And they got to play in one of the most intimate ball parks in the country, the Taj Mahal of the borough of Brooklyn, Ebbets Field.
-Throughout the grandstands at Brooklyn's Ebbets Field these days, there's a lot of commotion about a World Series.
Dixie Walker hangs one out for a clean base hit.
Joe Medwick steps up for a cut.
He's another of those popular Flatbush Fusiliers.
-During America's last summer of peace, the people of Brooklyn embraced their Dodgers as never before.
-Ebbets Field, when it was built, was supposed to be too large, but Charles Ebbets said baseball is just in its infancy.
But Ebbets Field soon became a very small ball park and became the most intimate ball park we've ever had.
If you were sitting in a box seat at first base, you could see the beads of perspiration on Gil Hodges' face.
You could almost see the fingers on Dolf Camilli's hand.
You could hear what the players said if you'd sit along third base.
If you were in the stands at Ebbets Field, you were practically in the ballgame.
-Well, first of all, you'd have to think of a sporting arena that took up all the space.
There was no lavish parking.
Ebbets Field was there, and if you wanted to go, then you would find a way to get there.
Ebbets Field was not gonna make it easy for you.
And if you really put the effort into it, you got there.
But when you got there, the cast of characters inside the ball park was truly remarkable.
-There were a lot of colorful fans that would come to Ebbets Field.
Hilda Chester, for some years, was one.
She used to sit out in the upper center field bleachers, and she would hang out a little sign that said, "Hilda is here."
And she would ring a cowbell.
And once in a while, she would write a note and drop it down to Pete Reiser, the center fielder, and have him bring the note in to manager Leo Durocher, with her advice, et cetera.
Eddie Battan was a real fan of Brooklyn.
He had a little piercing whistle, and he would whistle at a ballplayer, say a pitcher like Wyatt, and he'd start calling Whit.
And he'd keep calling Whit at the top of his voice until Wyatt took off his cap and bowed to Eddie Battan.
And genuine fans were the Dodgers Sym-phony.
One of my claims to fame, I will state right now, is that I named them.
The Dodgers Sym-phony, with the accent on the "phony," 'cause they didn't know a note of music at all.
They didn't really play music.
They just made a lot of noise.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -Hilda!
-And to show you the intimacy of Ebbets Field, it was probably my first or second year, and I was sitting next to Red Barber, and he was broadcasting, and I was just sitting there.
It was a quiet, lazy afternoon with just a few thousand people.
And Hilda suddenly was in the grandstands, instead of out in the bleachers, where she normally was.
And out of the blue came this voice -- "Vin Scully, I love you."
And the crowd roared.
And I was kind of embarrassed, and I lowered my head this way.
I heard this voice say, "Look at me when I'm talking to you."
So, there was no place like Ebbets Field, the relationship of the fans to whomsoever came in contact with them.
-1941 was the Dodgers' best season in 21 years.
They clinched the pennant with a 6-0 shutout of the Braves in Boston and then headed back to Brooklyn to celebrate.
-"The lid was off, and anything went, Durocher told us.
That train back to Brooklyn must have wobbled.
There wasn't a shirt on anybody's back.
We were riding into Brooklyn bareback until Durocher said we'd better dress up again on account of the crowd that was at the station.
Somebody cut my necktie right off at the knot.
We Bums were on the gravy train."
Joe Medwick.
-The borough savored every moment.
A million fans turned out to cheer their Bums on.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ The 1941 World Series with the Yankees was something Dodger fans would talk about for years.
On the eve of the first game, MacPhail fired Durocher again, then rehired him the next morning.
The Dodgers lost 3-2.
But it was the fourth game that would forever haunt Dodger fans.
With Brooklyn ahead in the ninth, and their relief pitcher Hugh Casey just one strike from tying the series at two games apiece, the Dodgers were tripped up by one of the oldest rules in baseball, devised by the New York Knickerbockers in the 1840s.
-"Get this picture, please, of Ebbets Field in the ninth inning.
The Dodgers leading 4-3.
Nobody on base, two Yankees already out, two strikes on Tommy Henrich.
Big Casey feeling for the proper grip on the curve ball he prayed would be the best pitch he ever threw in his life.
Casey watching Henrich swing and miss."
[ Cheers and applause ] "But catcher Mickey Owen muffed the ball.
Henrich, a strikeout victim, reached base.
The Yankees, capitalizing on a break, rushed four runs across the plate.
The strikeout that didn't retire the batter paved the way for Casey's defeat.
No pitcher ever had victory snatched from him in a manner quite as brutal."
Shirley Povich.
Washington Post.
-The Dodgers never recovered.
-Yankee Tommy Henrich swings, and the ball's over... -The Yankees took the series in five games.
-The show's over, but for years, they'll be talking about this weird, unprecedented World Series.
-Larry MacPhail got so drunk and was so angry at his players that he threatened to sell them all off to St. Louis.
Instead, the club's directors would fire him and bring in a new man -- Branch Rickey.
-Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.
-Two months and one day after the 1941 World Series ended, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America was finally drawn into the war.
The sporting news now suggested that the major leagues "withdraw from Japan the gift of baseball, which we made to that misguided and ill-begotten country."
But by that time, the imperial government of Japan had abolished the game as a baleful American influence.
Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wired the president, saying, "Baseball is yours to command."
"Everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before," Roosevelt replied, "and that means they ought to have a chance for recreation, for taking their minds off their work even more than before.
I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going."
But he provided no special draft exemption for ballplayers, and this time, there was no provision for soft defense jobs as there had been during World War I.
The Cleveland Indians' star pitcher, Bob Feller, at the very peak of his career, immediately enlisted in the Navy.
He would be gone almost four years.
-I thought, at that particular time, that we were losing real big.
We just lost 3,000 men at Pearl Harbor, 1,500 on one ship.
We were losing big in Europe.
And if you were going to do anything for your country, it was about time to get busy.
I thought there were more important things to do than be a baseball player.
-♪ You're gonna win that ballgame, Uncle Sam ♪ ♪ So pitch that cannonball the way you can ♪ ♪ You are slow beginning ♪ ♪ But just wait till that ninth inning ♪ ♪ You can finish what they all began ♪ ♪ Your team is all behind you to the man ♪ ♪ So keep your bat, and make that home-run slam ♪ ♪ Keep the bases loaded till your hits have all exploded ♪ ♪ You're gonna win that ballgame, Uncle Sam ♪ ♪♪♪ -More than 340 major leaguers and 3,000 minor leaguers went into uniform.
Most big leaguers found themselves playing baseball for the Army or the Navy, helping to raise funds for the war effort and boosting morale.
-♪ Your team is all behind you to a man ♪ ♪ So take your bat and make that home-run slam ♪ ♪ Show the Axis how we play ♪ ♪ In the good old U.S. way ♪ ♪ You're gonna win that ballgame, Uncle Sam ♪ ♪♪♪ -But some saw combat.
Bob Feller served on a battleship in the Pacific, earned eight battle stars, and kept in shape by jogging around the deck between Japanese air attacks.
Hank Bauer was wounded twice, and Lieutenant Warren Spahn survived the Battle of the Bulge.
[ Explosion ] American GIs played baseball everywhere they fought and taught it to anyone willing to stand still long enough to learn.
Young Japanese-Americans played it, too, inside the camps in which their own government interned them for the duration.
♪♪♪ -While we have lost many of our star players, the armed forces overseas demand that we play baseball.
The fans here in this country want to see our national game continue.
-World War II is a great period for baseball.
Talk about resiliency.
The best players -- the Williamses and the DiMaggios and the Fellers and the Greenbergs -- they were off fighting a foreign war.
Left behind were the lame, the halt, the aged, the too young, the one-armed Pete Gray, trying somehow to put together the semblance of baseball.
It led to not only such as Gray, but it led to 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall coming up to pitch in the major leagues.
It led to people whose careers were long past, now in decline.
Paul Waner came back.
Babe Herman came back to Brooklyn, my God.
And though no one could pretend that the quality of baseball was anywhere near first-rate, the pleasure that it gave was still a baseball pleasure.
That's what was important.
-Pete Gray of the St. Louis Browns had lost his arm at 6, but he did well as an outfielder and struck out just 11 times in 234 times at bat.
♪♪♪ The war wreaked such havoc on the major leagues that in 1944, the Browns, the worst team in baseball before the war, took the American League pennant -- the only pennant they ever won.
Even Bill Klem was called out of retirement for a series of exhibition games that same season.
"I could only see with one eye," he remembered, "but I got by fine.
I wasn't surprised because I never thought eyesight was the most important thing in umpiring."
-♪ You're gonna win that ballgame, Uncle Sam ♪ ♪♪♪ -This broadcast brought through the courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation affords the old babe the opportunity of sending greetings to everyone overseas at World Series time.
I want to say from the bottom of my heart and from the hearts of every American, I want to say God bless you great men and women over there, and God bless the ones that are going over.
And if we fight half as hard as you're fighting over there, that American flag will fly forever.
-In December 1944, a Japanese troopship was torpedoed off the island of Formosa.
Among those lost was 26-year-old Eiji Sawamura, the pitcher who had once struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
-♪ Oh, we hail from Rockford, Illinois ♪ ♪ It's just across the line ♪ ♪ We're not too young, we're not too old ♪ ♪ In fact, we're in our prime ♪ ♪ Oh, we hit the ball with might and main ♪ ♪ In fielding, we are fast ♪ ♪ We are the Rockford ball club ♪ ♪ We always dress with class ♪ ♪ Oh, yes, we are ♪ ♪ Oh, yes, we are ♪ ♪ The Rockford baseball team ♪ -These feminine phenoms play in the All-American Girls Baseball League, which keeps the turnstiles clicking in the loop's eight Midwest cities -- South Bend, Fort Wayne, Peoria, Rockford, Kenosha, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo.
Look close, folks.
This is not softball but real major league-type baseball and managed by former major league stars such as Jimmie Foxx.
-Jimmie Foxx, too old to be drafted and long past his prime, found another job in baseball as a coach in the brand-new All-American Girls professional baseball league.
The league was the creation of Philip Wrigley, the chewing gum king who owned the Cubs and who hoped to keep baseball alive in the small Midwestern cities that were losing their minor league teams to the war.
-Women had been discouraged from playing professional hardball for decades, but now, with thousands doing men's work in defense industries -- and doing it well -- many saw no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to play professionally.
There were already some 40,000 women playing semi-pro softball in small towns all across the country.
It was said that softball star Olympia Savona "runs bases like a man, slides like a man, and catches like a man.
If she could spit, she could go with Brooklyn."
Wrigley wanted to convert the best of the softballers to hardball and do it fast.
Hundreds journeyed to Chicago for Wrigley's tryouts in May of 1943, and four teams were quickly formed -- the Racine Belles, Kenosha Comets, South Bend Blue Sox, and Rockford Peaches.
-We were all feeling very patriotic.
And I really wanted to go into the WACs, and my mother and fa-- well, it was really my mother didn't want me to go.
So they contacted me about this girls league out in the Middle West, and at the end of the season, my folks knew I'd be home, so they sort of encouraged that.
And my father said, "Go try it.
If you don't like it, come back."
-I started as an outfielder, but I couldn't hit for beans, so I says, "If I'm going to stay out here, I better learn how to pitch."
So I became a pitcher.
I had a good fast ball and a good curve.
I was a little wild.
You didn't dig in against me, that's for sure.
-The women who made the cut had to be good, but they also had to be irreproachably feminine.
"No pants-wearing, tough-talking female softballer will play on any of our four teams," Wrigley declared.
The players were required to wear skirts, high heels, and makeup off the field, and a stiff fine was levied if they were caught disobeying.
Chaperones accompanied the all-white teams from town to town.
-They even sent us to Patricia Stevens Charm School to show us how to sit and walk and act, and some people really needed it.
-They told you how to put a coat on without knocking the person in the next booth down, how to sit down without exposing yourself, and how to get up and how to walk correctly.
-The All-American Girls League produced its share of stars.
Jean Faut won three pitching titles and pitched two perfect games.
Joanne Weaver hit .429 one year and won the batting title three summers in a row.
Sophie Kurys, nicknamed "Tina Cobb," averaged 100 stolen bases a season, and one year, stole 201 in 203 tries.
♪♪♪ And Anabelle Lee, whose nephew Bill would one day pitch for the Boston Red Sox, once threw a perfect game for the Minneapolis Millerettes.
[ Cheers and applause ] The new league soon doubled in size.
Sportswriters called them "the queens of swat" and "the belles of the ballgame."
They played a tough 110-game season, drew big crowds throughout the Middle West -- more than a million in their biggest year -- and won the affection and loyalty of fans wherever they went.
-And I think the fact that people looked and couldn't possibly think that girls could throw a ball, hit a ball, slide, and run the way they did...
I think that's what attracted the crowd and caused some people to remain so faithful that when we had our first reunion in Chicago in '82, if you can imagine it, a number of fans came to Chicago to join us at that reunion.
So we must have done something right.
-The league lasted nearly a decade, and many thought that one day, women might finally play alongside men.
But in 1952, the major leagues formally banned women from playing at any level of professional baseball.
[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪♪ -Beautiful foul ball.
-"What about the Satchel Paiges of the future?
Will they be playing in the big leagues?
The question becomes more pressing yearly.
It has been tossed into old Judge Landis' lap more than once, and the spectacularly adroit manner in which this articulate apostle of Lincoln tosses it out the window is a source of much marvel."
Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram.
-"There is no rule, formal or informal, or any understanding, unwritten, subterranean, or sub-anything, against the hiring of Negro players by the teams of organized ball."
Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
-He had helped restore the game's integrity after the Black Sox scandal of 1919.
He had also done all he could to keep it white.
It was true that there had never been any written law banning Black players, but Judge Landis had worked ceaselessly to ensure that the old "gentlemen's agreement" against hiring them remained firmly in effect.
♪♪♪ When the Pittsburgh Pirates sought permission to hire slugger Josh Gibson in 1943, Landis bluntly refused.
"The colored ballplayers have their own league.
Let them stay in their own league."
When Bill Veeck, Jr. attempted to buy the eighth-place Phillies, then restaff it with stars from the Negro Leagues, Landis made sure the team was sold to someone else.
And when Leo Durocher told a newspaperman that he'd seen plenty of Blacks good enough for the big leagues, Landis forced him to claim he had been misquoted.
But the hypocrisy of fighting racism abroad while ignoring it at home grew clearer.
Pickets appeared at Yankee Stadium with signs reading, "If we are able to stop bullets, why not balls?"
-This war dealt with racism in part, and this was brought home.
So I think there was this heightened consciousness about racism itself and the whole war discrediting racism.
And I think that was what energized Black people to a great degree.
-Blacks now demanded and got thousands of good-paying defense jobs, and with their newfound economic strength, they supported the Negro Leagues as never before, and they insisted on equal opportunity.
Black leaders again pressed Landis for an answer.
-"I've said everything that's going to be said on that subject.
The answer is no."
-On July 6, 1944, a month after D-Day, a young Army lieutenant named Jack Roosevelt Robinson boarded a military bus near Fort Hood, Texas.
The driver ordered him to "get to the back of the bus where the colored people belong."
Robinson refused and was court-martialed.
But the Army judges found him fully within his rights and acquitted him.
"I had learned," Robinson wrote, "that I was in two wars -- one against a foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home."
A few days after Robinson's trial, Kenesaw Mountain Landis died at the age of 77.
-♪ Take me out to the ballgame ♪ ♪ Take me out to the park ♪ ♪ Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks ♪ ♪ I don't care if I ever get back ♪ ♪ You can root, root, root for the home team ♪ ♪ If they don't win, it's a shame ♪ ♪ When it's one, two, three strikes, you're out ♪ ♪ At the old ballgame ♪ There you are.
[ Laughs ] [ Cheers and applause ] -♪ You're gonna win that ballgame, Uncle Sam ♪ ♪ So pitch that cannonball the way you can ♪ ♪ You were slow beginning ♪ ♪ But just wait till that ninth inning ♪ ♪ You can finish what they all began ♪ ♪ You're gonna win that ballgame, Uncle Sam ♪ ♪ Show the Axis how we play in the good old U.S. way ♪ ♪ You're gonna win that ballgame, Uncle Sam ♪ ♪♪♪ -When the war ended in August 1945, General Douglas MacArthur assumed command of the American occupation of Japan.
He found the stadium in which the Tokyo Giants had played before the war filled with unexploded ammunition.
He ordered it cleared and urged that the Japanese start playing baseball again.
It would foster democracy, he said.
♪♪♪ -"Baseball people are generally allergic to new ideas.
It took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms.
It is the hardest thing in the world to get big-league baseball to change anything -- even spikes on a new pair of shoes -- but they will...eventually.
They are bound to."
Branch Rickey.
-This I know -- In March of 1945, Mr. Rickey told me in confidence that only the board of directors of the ball club knew, and only his family knew, and now I was gonna know, that he was going to bring a Black player to the white Dodgers.
And Mr. Rickey said that going back to when he was the baseball coach at Ohio Wesleyan University, he took the team down to play a series at South Bend, Indiana, with Notre Dame.
And he said, "My best player was my catcher, and he was Black.
But," said Mr. Rickey, "when we were registering this squad in the hotel, when the Black player stepped up to sign the register, the clerk jerked the register back and said, 'We don't register Negroes in this hotel.'"
And Rickey said, "I remonstrated and said, 'This is the baseball team from Ohio Wesleyan.
We're the guests of Notre Dame University.'"
He said, "I don't care who you are.
We don't register Negroes in this hotel."
"Well," Mr. Rickey said, "there are two beds in my room, aren't there?"
And he said yes.
Well, he says, "Can't he use one bed and not register?"
And the clerk grudgingly allowed that to happen.
And Mr. Rickey took the key, handed it to the Black player, and said, "You go up to the room and wait for me.
Soon as I get the rest of the team settled, I'll be up."
Mr. Rickey said, "When I opened the door, here this fine young man was sitting on the edge of a chair, and he was crying and he was pulling at his hands."
And he said, "Mr. Rickey, it's my skin.
If I could just tear it off, I'd be like everyone else."
And Mr. Rickey told me this day in March of 1945, he said, "All these years, I have heard that boy crying, and now," he said, "I'm gonna do something about it."
♪♪♪ -"This is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice, and race hatred because we have witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such cruel and fallacious policy."
New York Times.
-Judge Landis' replacement as commissioner was a jovial, gregarious senator from Kentucky, Albert Benjamin "Happy" Chandler, who said he took the job because the $50,000 salary was so much more than the $10,000 he'd been making as a United States Senator.
Few thought he would be an improvement, but in April 1945, two Black sportswriters, Wendell Smith and Rick Roberts, who had campaigned tirelessly for integration since before the war, called upon the new commissioner to find out where he stood.
"If a Black boy can make it on Okinawa and Guadalcanal," Chandler told his visitors, "hell, he can make it in baseball."
Still, a secret vote revealed that 15 out of 16 club owners opposed integration.
The lone exception was Branch Rickey, who had left St. Louis in 1942 to become president and general manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
-It was in a narrow, tight, and unenlightened world that was -- Branch Rickey said, "I'm going to do this.
I'm going to integrate baseball.
I'm no longer going to allow a part of the population to be excluded."
Now, Rickey's detractors say he would do anything to win, and it wasn't because he had such a big heart or that he was such a great believer in civil rights.
He simply wanted to win.
Well, there were a lot of men in baseball who wanted to win, and they wouldn't go this far.
This is far?
I don't think so at all.
-Branch Rickey was equally celebrated for his shrewdness and for the sermons he loved to deliver for the sports pages.
Red Smith said he was a "man of many facets, all turned on."
Reporters called his office the "cave of the winds" and called him "the deacon" and "the Mahatma" because he reminded them of a combination of "God, your father, and a Tammany Hall leader."
-"Branch Rickey is a con man -- brilliant, fascinating, erudite, but still a con man.
I've been listening to him for 25 years, and I've always been impressed, seldom enlightened.
The trick of the con man is to weave a spell.
In this, Branch Rickey stands alone.
Not since the days of William Jennings Bryan and Billy Sunday has any man fallen so deeply in love with the melodic quality of his own voice."
Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram.
-He pitches, and the hitter swings... -Rickey had already transformed the game once by devising the farm system during his quarter of a century as president of the St. Louis Cardinals.
-...with two out.
-He was already rich and in his 60s, but he loved the challenge of building a new dynasty, and he loved Brooklyn -- its fierce local loyalties, its distinctive neighborhoods, and devotion to the Dodgers.
Now he was plotting a second, still more sweeping, revolution.
Rickey believed with equal fervor in fair play and big profits.
He was convinced integration would be good for America, for baseball, and for his balance sheet.
-Branch Rickey had seen us play before 50,000 people in Comiskey Park, you understand?
We had played in Yankee Stadium, for 30,000, 40,000 people, and we played at the Dodger-- Ebbets Field.
So he knew, "Here's a new source of revenue."
-"The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of the game is the Black race," Rickey confided.
"The Negroes will make us winners for years to come."
His broadcaster, Red Barber, was stunned and contemplated resigning.
-When Mr. Rickey told me that he was going to bring a Black player to the Brooklyn Dodgers, I didn't doubt it.
You didn't doubt Mr. Rickey.
If he said he was gonna do it, he was gonna do it.
Well, I came home and talked to my wife, Lila, and I said -- After all, you have to remember, I was born in Columbus, Mississippi.
I grew up in Sanford, Florida.
I went to the segregated University of Florida.
This was something -- I'd never even dreamed of.
And it was a shock to me.
I think it is only honest to say so.
-Meanwhile, Branch Rickey's scouts began to scour the Negro Leagues for a likely player.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -A race man is a person who is proud of his race.
He want his race to advance.
He want his race to be recognized.
That's the type of guy Jackie was.
That's his whole thing -- recognition, treat me as I'm supposed to be treated.
Give our people a fair shot at it.
We make it, fine.
If we don't make it, that's still fine, but give us an equal chance.
That's what a race man is.
-Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in 1919 in Cairo, Georgia, the grandson of a slave and the fifth child of a sharecropper who soon deserted his family.
He was brought up by his mother, a domestic, in a white neighborhood in Pasadena, California, where white children pelted him with rocks until he and his elder brothers began to pelt them back.
-Jack, even in high school, was concerned about what was happening to his race.
He had that early on.
His mother, Mallie Robinson, was an extraordinary woman.
And she came up from Georgia with five children and no prospects, and just her determination to make it for her kids.
She set the example and set the pace.
She was a real pioneer.
And so a part of what she gave him was self-esteem.
He wore white shirts to UCLA -- he was ebony black -- and at a time when my generation really was not that proud to be Black, but not Jack.
And what attracted me to him was he walked straight, he held his head up, and he was proud of not just his color but his people.
-At Pasadena Junior College and UCLA, he excelled at every sport he tried -- led his basketball league in scoring two years running, broke his own brother's national record at the broad jump, and was one of the country's best running backs in football.
-Watch him leading UCLA to a 16-6 victory over Oregon on October 28, 1939.
Touchdown for Jackie Robinson.
-Baseball was relatively low on his list, but he was good enough at it so that when he left the Army in 1944, the Kansas City Monarchs offered him a job as shortstop at $400 a month.
-Jackie came to Kansas City Monarchs in 1945.
We spring-trained that year in Houston, Texas, and after spring training, we went to New Orleans -- exhibition game there.
Well, we had more people than seats on the bus.
Jack said, "Look, I'm a rookie.
My seat is in the step of the bus.
I'm gonna earn mine just like everybody else."
That's the type of guy that he was.
-Jackie came to the Monarchs, and we'd been going for 30 years going to this filling station in Oklahoma, where we would buy gas.
We got 2 50-gallon tanks on that thing.
We'd buy the gas but we couldn't use the restroom.
Jackie wanted to use the restroom.
Jackie said, "I'm going to the restroom."
The man said, "Boy, you can't use it."
Jackie said, "Take the hose out the tank."
Take the hose out of the tank, this guy ain't gonna sell 100 gallons of gas.
He ain't gonna sell 100 gallons of gas in another month.
So he said, "Well, then, I'll tell you what."
Jackie said, "If we can't go to the restroom, we won't get any gas here."
"We'll get it someplace else."
He said, "Well, you boys can go the restroom, but don't stay long."
So actually, he started something there.
Now, every place we would go, we wanted to know first could we use the restroom.
If we couldn't use the restroom, no gas.
-He hit .387 his first season, and Wendell Smith, still pressing for integration, arranged a tryout for Robinson and two other young Negro League players with the Boston Red Sox.
Although Boston manager Joe Cronin was impressed by Robinson's skills, Boston passed up the opportunity to become the first major league team to integrate.
Instead, it would be the last.
By this time, Robinson had caught the attention of Branch Rickey.
He sent his chief scout, Clyde Sukeforth, to look Robinson over.
-Well, he called me and he said, "I want you to see a game in Chicago Friday night."
He said, "Pay, in particular, attention to a fella named Robinson."
"Now," he said, "I want you to identify yourself.
Tell him who sent you and what you want to see.
His arm -- pay in particular attention to his arm."
-Sukeforth was impressed and told Robinson Branch Rickey would like to see him.
-He came down, and I talked to him at length.
I mean, uh, he was pouring the questions to me about why is Rickey interested in me.
And the more you talked to the guy, the more you were impressed with the guy -- the determination written all over him.
-Robinson did not know precisely what Rickey had in mind, but he agreed to accompany Sukeforth back to Brooklyn.
-Well, I introduced Robinson, and Mr. Rickey went right to work on him.
He said, "Jack, I've been looking for a great colored ballplayer for a great many years.
I have some reason to believe you might be that man."
-Mr. Rickey, who had never laid eyes on Robinson, sent for him and had him in his office for three hours.
Mr. Rickey was not only very intelligent, but very intelligent vocally.
He never used profanity, and his strongest expletive was "Judas priest."
But that morning, Mr. Rickey took Robinson into every possible negative situation he would encounter in all the world of Jim Crowism, et cetera.
And he took Robinson into what would happen on the playing field, that he'd be thrown at his head, that he would be slid into and spiked, et cetera.
He screamed in his face every expletive that Robinson would ever hear.
And he said to Robinson, "Do you have the guts not to fight back?"
And he said finally, "The only way you can be the first Black man to do this is you'll have to promise me that for three years, you will not answer back.
You cannot win this by retaliation.
You can't echo a curse with a curse, a blow with a blow."
-So, Robinson gave it a little thought before he answered, and that impressed Rickey.
If he'd have said right off quick, "Oh, I can do that" -- Well, he gave it some thought, and he said, "Mr. Rickey, if you want to take this gamble, I promise you there will be no incident."
And that was just what Rickey wanted to hear.
-He picked Jack because he showed an assertive side of himself, which he would need.
He showed the kind of strength to go through things.
He also was a deeply religious man -- Mr. Rickey was -- and he knew about Jack's religious convictions, so they were kind of alike in that sense.
I think he saw the various aspects of the character that attracted him and made him feel that he could come through a scathing experience without being harmed or without giving in... giving up.
There was very much of a partnership between them, and they had to agree on these things because they were in it together.
Rickey needed Jack as much as Jack needed Rickey.
They just had to do it together.
-They picked him because of who he was and what he was.
Sure, the baseball skill was important, but there were other skilled players -- Monte Irvin everyone expected to be the first.
But Robinson had a determination and an ability to, on the one hand, turn the other cheek, but on the other hand, as he turned the cheek, to let the person who was his antagonist know that it would come around again.
-The one thing that we weren't sure... that Jackie could hold his temper.
Jackie had a terrific temper.
He knew how to fight, and he would fight.
If Jackie can hold down that temper, he can do it.
He knew he had the whole Black race, so to speak, on his shoulders.
So he just said, "I can take it.
I can handle it.
I will take it for the rest of the country and the guys."
And that's why he took all that mess, and it killed him.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -On Tuesday, October 23, 1945, Rickey's office made an announcement that it said would affect baseball "from coast to coast."
The Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' top farm club, had hired Jackie Robinson.
If he did well for Montreal, he would move up to the Dodgers.
♪♪♪ -And now to bat comes Ted Williams hitting at .344.
Big Ted digs in.
The shift is on with Coleman on the grass in right.
-You can't love baseball in the abstract.
You have to belong to one team for a long period of time.
That's what it's all about.
Somebody once said, "Baseball is not a life and death matter, but the Red Sox are," which is exactly right.
♪♪♪ -The greatest of all baseball seasons boils over in World Series fever.
Up in Boston, ha!
The postman doesn't ring.
He backs up a truck with a half-million applications for 60,000 tickets.
Boston, center of culture, home of the softly modulated cheer, goes hog-wild over its first series in 28 years.
Hey, who's that?
Casey?
Nope.
It's Ted Williams, Red Sox power hitter extraordinaire.
If the Dodgers or Cards wonder where Ted gets his power, have a look.
Here's a preview of a nightmare for National League pitchers -- a home run bearing the authentic Williams label.
So pull up your socks... Red Sox, that is.
World Series time is here again.
-The Boston Red Sox were heavily favored to win the 1946 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.
They had not appeared in the series since 1918, just before they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees.
As expected, the Red Sox won the first game, but Ted Williams was held to just one hit after St. Louis employed a bizarre new strategy against the Boston left fielder.
They called it the Williams shift.
-"All eyes were focused on Williams as the Cards sprang a newfangled defense against the dreaded Boston clouter.
They moved their third baseman, Whitey Kurowski, to the right of shortstop Marty Marion as they bunched all four of their infielders between first and a few feet beyond second base.
The outfielders also draped themselves far to the right, leaving the left side of the field unprotected."
New York Times.
-No hits.
Right at somebody.
Awfully hard to get a ball through all of that.
And so as a result, I didn't produce in the later innings on account of I'd either get a walk or I'd hit it at somebody, or if I were lucky -- 1 in 16 -- hit a home run.
Well, those odds are not very good.
-They knew where he was going to hit it.
And he was such proud guy that though he could clearly turn his swing around and hit it to the third-base side of the infield, he wouldn't do it.
He was gonna get his hits no matter what the defense did on his terms.
-And now, it's Walker's turn.
Singles, and the fun is just beginning.
Fun for the Cards, that is.
-As a result of the Williams shift and an uncharacteristic burst of hitting by the Cardinals, St. Louis stayed alive, and the series went to a seventh game.
-It's the deciding game of the World Series at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
-With the score tied 3-3 in the bottom of the 8th, the Cardinals' Enos Slaughter led off with a single.
Harry Walker followed with a line drive to left center.
-"At first, it didn't seem possible that Slaughter could score on the hit, but the Carolinian they call Country ran as perhaps he had never run before.
He rounded second, third, and then sped for home while a bewildered Boston shortstop, handling the relay from the outfield, spun around to make a futile throw to the plate."
-The relay home is not in time.
The Cards win 4-3, baseball's world champions.
Congratulations to the champs.
-"As for Joe Cronin and his no-longer glittering BoSox, they left the field a sadly dejected and disillusioned lot.
To add to their mental anxiety, they gained the added dubious distinction of being the only Boston club ever to lose a World Series."
New York Times.
-I was so sure we'd win that series.
That's the worst disappointment of my career, no question about it.
I was a total bust.
I hit .200, we lost the series -- the most disappointing thing that ever happened to me.
Um, I can't describe how I felt about failing in that situation.
-The Boston Red Sox would have to wait another 21 years to play again in the World Series.
Ted Williams would never get another chance.
♪♪♪ -I think that losing is what baseball is all about in the end.
We think it's about winning, but as we go on as fans and even as players, I think you discover that it really is about -- there's much more losing in it.
After all, the batter only succeeds 1/3 of the time, uh, at best.
And this runs very deeply in baseball.
As the season goes along, fans realize that their hopes won't be fulfilled.
Once again, they're gonna be heartbroken at the end.
-I saw baseball after the Black Sox scandal -- everybody said, "Well, baseball, it kind of got off of baseball."
And here comes Babe Ruth hitting a home run.
That brought it back, see?
Then we went into another little recession in baseball.
Here come the lights that brought it back.
See?
Now, we're going to the war, and the -- all the good ballplayers gone, so that kind of brought it down a little.
Here comes Jackie Robinson.
[ Playing "O Canada" ] -Through most of the 1946 season, the baseball world's attention was riveted on the Montreal Royals and Jackie Robinson.
♪♪♪ Branch Rickey hoped Robinson would have an easier time in Canada, where race was much less of an issue, but the Montreal Royals' manager was Clay Hopper, a Mississippian.
He begged Rickey not to make him the manager of an integrated team, asking, "Do you really think a nigger's a human being?"
♪♪♪ Robinson later confessed that he'd been "nervous as the devil," but he told reporters he was ready for any challenge he might meet from white fans or white players -- "I'm ready to take the chance.
Maybe I'm doing something for my race."
Rogers Hornsby, the great National League slugger, said an integrated team would never work.
Bob Feller, who had often barnstormed with Black teams, was sure Robinson would fall short.
"He was too muscle-bound to hit well," he explained.
"If he were a white man, I doubt they would even consider him big-league material."
But in his very first game for Montreal at Jersey City on April 18th, Robinson went 4 for 5, stole two bases, and scored twice by provoking the pitcher to balk.
"This would have been a big day for any man," the New York Times reported, "but under the special circumstances, it was a tremendous feat."
On the road, Robinson endured without complaint separate and unequal facilities, pretended not to hear the taunts of his opponents, nor to mind the initial coolness of his teammates.
The pressure and the abuse were unrelenting.
-It came in all the forms that racism comes in.
It came in the form of racial epithets, it came in the form of gestures, it came in the form of little incidents like putting the black cat on the field.
I was sitting in a section where there were some rabid anti-Robinson people who were yelling at him, calling him names.
It was really to try to throw him off.
They wanted him to hear them.
As a matter of fact, I felt it so keenly -- They were at my back, and I could not turn around because I was under the same constraints Jack was under, but I kept hoping that my body was blocking some of the sound, because I could see what their intent was.
-As the season progressed, he was wracked by stomach pain, on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
But in the face of all the abuse, Robinson only played better.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -Robinson sparked the Royals with sharp hitting and fielding, daring base running, leading them first to the league championship and then to victory in the Minor League World Series.
After the final game, jubilant Montreal fans chased Robinson for three blocks as he left the stadium.
"It was probably the only day in history," a friend remembered, "that a Black man ran from a white mob with love, instead of lynching, on its mind."
Even Clay Hopper, the Montreal manager who had questioned Robinson's humanity before the season started, now called him "a great ballplayer," and he urged Branch Rickey to move him up to the Dodgers for the 1947 season.
But Rickey gave no indication of his intentions.
♪♪♪ -"February 1, 1947 -- I know the real reason Josh Gibson died.
I don't need a doctor's report for confirmation, either.
He was murdered by big-league baseball."
Pittsburgh Courier.
-Josh Gibson, perhaps the greatest of all the Negro League stars, was just 35 in the winter of 1947, but old beyond his years.
He had lost weight, was drinking too much, no longer able to play as he once had because of constant pain in his knees.
And he had grown increasingly erratic, lapsing into long silences, hearing voices no one else could hear, threatening suicide, holding imaginary conversations in which he tried in vain to persuade Joe DiMaggio to recognize him.
On January 20th, he suffered a stroke and died.
There was no money for a gravestone.
-You're in a neighborhood you've never been in before.
You understand that feeling that you would have?
Alright.
Here's Jackie, and to Jackie to play in the major leagues, that meant one white boy wasn't going to play.
See?
And so this is -- I could understand the rebellion.
I could understand the rebellion because we had played against these fellas, and they knew that we could play.
And they knew, if we were allowed to play, a lot of them wouldn't play.
See?
-During spring training, 1947, Rickey staged a seven-game series between the Dodgers and the Royals in order to display Jackie Robinson's skills to the men with whom he hoped Robinson would soon be playing.
The strategy backfired.
Robinson's brilliant play -- he batted .625 and stole 7 bases -- seemed only to antagonize his future teammates.
Nearly half of the Dodgers were Southern whites, and three of their players -- outfielder Dixie Walker, second baseman Eddie Stanky, and the third-string catcher Bobby Bragan -- all from Alabama, drew up a petition saying they would rather be traded than play with a Black teammate, then went around gathering signatures.
-Durocher heard about that petition, and he called a meeting, and he really laid down the law.
He said, in effect, "You know what you can do with that petition.
And also, when Mr. Rickey gets here tomorrow, if some of you fellas don't want to play with him, Mr. Rickey will take care of it, because he's coming.
He can play ball, and more than that, there are more Black players coming after him, and you fellas had better shape up."
-One Southerner refused to sign -- shortstop Pee Wee Reese from Louisville, Kentucky.
-Pee Wee Reese was one of the first to give a public reaction.
He was being mustered out of the armed forces and he got the word that Robinson was coming -- and Robinson had been playing shortstop -- and some writer asked how he felt, and Pee Wee said, "Well, if he can take my job, he's entitled to it."
-The players' revolt was stopped before it got started.
Jackie Robinson was going to make them all rich, Durocher assured the Dodgers.
He had made the team and would be with them when they started the season at Ebbets Field.
Happy.
Happy.
We've been looking forward to this thing for years.
We were -- oh!
Everybody was so happy now.
Jackie's going to the major leagues.
We were all elated, but it was the death knell for our baseball.
But who cares?
Who cares?
[ Cheers and applause ] -Hodges is one for three.
Outfield around toward left.
The pitch...
Swung on!
A high fly ball deep into left field!
It is in there for a home run!
And it's a 10-6 ball game.
-Scoring became almost an obsession with me when I was a child, because my father taught me so proudly how to master all those miniature symbols, and then left me when the radio was on to score the games while he went to work.
And when he would come home -- when I was 5 or 6 years old -- he would ask me to go through from inning to inning, and I would re-create the entire game for him, and he never let me know that in the newspapers the next day, he could have found out from the newspapers what had happened.
I thought without me, he wouldn't know what had happened in the game.
And so I was really like a little historian in those days, and it was such a magic thing.
When he would come home, I would sit on the porch with him, go over my meticulously kept game, and feel like I was saving it for him forever.
-Ruth swings and misses... -In 1901, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns was born in Brooklyn, the son of a fireman.
His younger brother was killed by a trolley car.
His mother and father died shortly thereafter, and he was raised by an aunt in Flatbush, in the shadow of Ebbets Field.
He became a bank examiner for the state of New York, moved to Long Island, but remained a devoted Dodger fan.
In 1943, his daughter Doris was born.
-I think my earliest memory is being taken when I was maybe 4 years old to Brooklyn.
So my memory of the Dodgers is connected to my father showing me the street where he grew up, where he played ball, taking me to Horn and Hardhart's Cafeteria and sticking the nickels in, all of which was just as important to me at that time as going to Ebbets Field.
But as we approached Ebbets Field, he made it seem like a shrine.
I don't really remember the game, but just the whole fabric of being there with him and knowing it was so special that he was sharing his past with me that day.
One of the things baseball allowed him and me to do is at night when he put me to bed, he would tell me stories of the past.
So I would hear all of his favorite memories going back to 1910, and he described to me the importance of Jackie Robinson being there for civil rights, but more importantly, he told me, "This guy's a great player, and we're gonna win with him."
So it was all connected in a very little girl's mind with somebody who then became my hero from the time I was 4 until he stopped playing baseball.
♪♪♪ -"History was made here Tuesday afternoon in Brooklyn's flag-bedecked Ebbets Field when smiling Jackie Robinson trotted out on the green-swept diamond with the rest of his Dodger teammates.
No less than 15 photographers surrounded Robinson before the game and clicked his picture from every position imaginable."
Pittsburgh Courier.
-On April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field in Flatbush in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, the Brooklyn Dodgers faced the Boston Braves.
It was opening day, and for the first time in modern major league history, a Black man, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, was starting the game at first base.
There were 26,623 fans in the stands, more than half of them Black, come to see Jackie Robinson.
♪♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ] -Strike!
-Although Robinson went hitless in three trips to the plate, just the sight of him stirred the crowd.
-I remember the excitement and just the feeling of having gotten through it and a sense that Ebbets Field itself was small enough so that we kind of felt immediately that we could find our place in it.
At least I did.
The Black fans were so tense and so enthusiastic, their expectations were so high, and their aspirations were so high, that they just reacted to everything.
Every swing of the bat, somehow they got something going with the Black fans.
[ Cheers and applause ] And white fans, I think, were probably more in a frame of mind to wait and see.
There was this overpowering feeling that people's hopes were riding on what Jack was doing, as much as their interest as fans in the score.
[ Cheers and applause ] -The Dodgers won that day, 5-3.
-You can almost divide American history in the 20th century -- before Robinson and after Robinson.
America was defined by baseball.
This was our national game.
So the drama of this moment of Robinson coming in is enormous because of the game being tied to the national character -- in some way, the game being tied with America's sense of its mission and its destiny.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -For me, baseball's finest moment is the day Jackie Robinson set foot on a major league field for the first time in 1947.
I'm most proud to be an American and most proud to be a baseball fan when baseball has led America rather than followed it.
It has done so several times, but this is the most transforming incident.
I can think of no man having a more difficult road ahead of him than Jackie Robinson in '47 and no one walking that road more valiantly or more proficiently.
I would say that Jackie Robinson is my great hero among baseball players, and he's my great hero as an American.
He is an individual who shaped the crowd.
-Elsewhere in Brooklyn that evening, at 1574 50th Street in Borough Park, a Jewish family gathered for seder, the feast of Passover.
"Why is this night different from all other nights?"
the youngest male asked in the centuries-old tradition.
Before his father could reply, he answered his own question.
"Because a Black man is playing in the major leagues."
♪♪♪ Too late.
It was a wonderful moment when it happened, but when I think of it, it brings pain, too.
It was a great triumph, and Branch Rickey was a great leader in this society, but why did it take all those years?
Why should it have been such a big event?
Why weren't we capable of better?
How could you possibly say that they were less than we were?
Didn't we put that behind us in the Civil War?
Why wasn't the question settled?
-12 days after Robinson's debut, Babe Ruth Day was celebrated in ball parks across the country.
Ruth himself appeared in Yankee Stadium.
He was very ill now, with cancer of the throat.
"The termites have got me," he told an old friend.
Surgery had slowed the disease but damaged his larynx.
-Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
You know how bad my voice sounds?
Well, it feels just as bad.
You know, this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth.
That means the boys.
And after you've been a boy and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in your national pastime.
The only real game, I think, in the world is baseball.
-The appeal of baseball was that it was fair, that if you understood the rules, all you had to do was work hard and reach the maximum level of your ability, and you could succeed.
This was the promise that anyone could be an American, anyone could play baseball.
It wasn't really true.
Jackie Robinson made it true.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -"The iron curtain which has prevented Negroes from participation in Major League Baseball has finally been lifted.
Now the real challenge faces Negro America -- the challenge of taking this tremendous victory in stride.
The challenge to stop our booing over some untoward incident which might happen on the ball field.
Remember that Jackie might be roughed up some.
Remember -- today, Negro America, whose symbol is Jackie Robinson, is on trial.
Mr. Rickey opened the door, and Jackie's foot is in it."
Pittsburgh Courier.
-Make no mistake about it, Jackie could have been a Brazilian -- anything.
If Jackie hadn't started drawing people to that park and been able to produce, he'd have been gone, and I think that's one reason he fought so hard, because he knew if he failed, our people would fail, and he was determined to make it.
-And he was the most exciting ballplayer that we had and the greatest gate attraction since Babe Ruth.
-Safe!
-The thing that made Robinson so exciting was his base running.
When Robinson was on base -- dashing off first base, dashing off second, dashing off third, threatening to steal the next base, upsetting the pitcher -- every eye in the ballpark was on Jackie Robinson.
-Robinson played brilliantly and drew just the kind of huge crowds that Branch Rickey had hoped for.
By July, the Dodgers were in first place.
-♪ One ball, one strike, one out, one run ♪ ♪ Jackie at the bat, guess what he done ♪ ♪ He hit the ball with the bat, the bat hit the ball ♪ ♪ You should have heard those fans all call ♪ ♪ Goin', it's goin', this time it's really gone ♪ ♪ They do the baseball boogie when Jackie comes running home ♪ ♪ Now, the umpire hollers the same old thing ♪ ♪ Grabbed Jackie's bat and began to swing ♪ ♪ Cameras start to flashing, I join the crowd ♪ ♪ Clappin' my hands and hollerin' real loud ♪ ♪ Goin', it's goin', this time it's really gone ♪ ♪ They do the baseball boogie when Jackie comes running home ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ Grandma says she just want to go ♪ ♪ She listens in on the radio ♪ ♪ Feet got happy, she grabbed her dress ♪ ♪ Turned back and hollered, "Jackie Robinson is a mess!"
♪ ♪ Goin', it's goin', this time it's really gone ♪ ♪ She done the baseball boogie when Jackie come running home ♪ ♪♪♪ -Safe!
-He ran over those base pads and just excited the crowd.
I mean, he began to pull people on his side by his performance.
And his performance also was his outlet.
So it worked both ways, that he created fans immediately.
[ Cheers and applause ] I mean, the electricity was in the air, in the stands, on the field, and in our hearts.
-The thing about Jackie Robinson that was so thrilling to me was that every time he got on base, you just felt like everybody else was nervous.
So you felt like he was controlling the whole tempo of the game, and you knew he was going to steal second at some point, or you knew he would pretend to steal second at some point, and that the pitcher was nervous, and he wasn't making as good of a pitch, and somehow all eyes were riveted toward him so that when they were on the base path, you just somehow felt something was going to happen, some magic.
It didn't always happen, but you felt it always could.
So there was that sense of electricity.
And I just thought he was the best there was.
-Shea pitching to Jackie Robinson in the first inning, walks the Brooklyn first baseman.
And the Dodgers have a rally in the making, with Pete Reiser coming to bat.
And then Robinson promptly steals second base.
-What happened is, Jackie took Black baseball to the major leagues.
See?
At the time, baseball was a base-to-base thing.
You hit the ball, you wait on first base till somebody hit it again, see?
But in our baseball, you got on base, if you walked, you stole second, they'd bunt you over to third, and you actually scored runs without a hit.
This was our baseball.
-I saw him once, he walked, base on balls, got to first base, and he walked down to first base, didn't trot.
Got to first base, just turned around with his foot on the base, didn't move.
The pitcher looked over at him, looked over at him, Robinson didn't even move off the base.
Pitcher started to throw, Robinson stole second.
Got onto second base, now the pitcher's looking back like this, looking back, looking back.
Robinson was taking a lead now.
The pitcher kept looking back.
He walked the batter.
Men on first and second.
Robinson still moving back and forth, back and forth.
He walked the next batter.
Now Robinson's on third base, bases loaded.
And he took this tremendous lead.
He just walked off the base, 10, 15, 20 feet, And the pitcher was almost panicky.
The third baseman came in, he threw over, Robinson got back.
Robinson did the same thing.
Pitcher looked over.
Finally the manager came out and he motioned to the third baseman, "Stand on the bag.
Hold Robinson on the base."
I never saw that before, haven't seen it since, where a third baseman held the runner on the base.
And the pitcher kept looking over, threw to the next batter -- walked him, walked in the run, and Robinson walked home and touched the plate and walked back.
He created the run all by himself.
-Mr. Rickey said that Robinson was the most competitive ballplayer he had seen since Ty Cobb.
But the amazing thing about Robinson was not what he did on the field, but what he did to control himself for those first three years.
It was absolutely terrible.
♪♪♪ -In the coming days, as the Dodgers went around the league, there were threats to shoot Robinson from the stands.
Warnings that his wife and infant son would be killed if he dared keep playing.
Pitchers threw at his head.
Base runners intentionally spiked him.
Hotels refused to house him.
♪♪♪ Bench jockeys began shouting racial slurs during batting practice and kept it up until the last out.
"Nigger, go back to the cotton fields."
"Hey, snowflake, which one of the white boys' wives are you dating tonight?"
"Hey, boy, how about a shine?"
-It was well-known that the owners did not want this experiment to work.
They wanted Rickey to fail.
They wanted Jack to fail.
And so whatever they could do behind the scenes, they would do.
There were also teams, and individuals on teams, who did not want it to work.
-When Philadelphia came to Ebbets Field, they leveled torrents of abuse, led by manager Ben Chapman, on Robinson.
It was disgraceful.
It was terrible.
And the Dodger players then became incensed, and Stanky -- who had been one of the motivators about that petition down in spring training camp -- Stanky then yelled to the Philadelphia dugout, "Why don't you fellas pick on someone who can answer back?"
And Mr. Rickey felt that the Philadelphia players' abuse of Robinson was beneficial because it united the white Dodgers for their teammate Robinson.
-Oh, in Philadelphia, it was disgusting, I mean the way they rode that fella.
Oh.
And you know, the Philadelphia press got on Chapman.
He was the ringleader.
Now it looks like his job is in danger.
He has to swallow his pride and ask Robinson if he'll have his picture taken with him, and Robinson's man enough to say, "Yeah, I will."
-The first time the Dodgers showed up in Cincinnati, there was a very hostile crowd.
Cincinnati's just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, and Pee Wee is from Louisville, a Southerner, "Little Colonel."
And there was a lot of booing going on, this, that, and the other, and there came a lull in the ballgame, and Pee Wee just walked over to where Robinson was standing on the infield and put his arm around his shoulder, and talked to him for a moment and then went back, which said to the crowd, "This is my friend."
-I would like to bet that no athlete have they ever tried to intimidate more than they did Jackie Robinson.
He had tons and tons of guts.
But, I want to tell you, when they start throwing at you, at your noggin, you get mad, but you better be awful careful about doing it.
And he faced that probably as much as any player his first and second year in the big leagues.
[ Bat cracks ] -The most serious incident came in St. Louis, against Branch Rickey's old team, the Cardinals.
Enos "Country" Slaughter, out at first by at least 10 feet, nonetheless jumped into the air and deliberately laid open Robinson's thigh with his spikes.
Robinson's anger almost overcame him, but when his teammates threatened to retaliate, he talked them out of it.
-I never once heard Jack say out loud, "I want to give up.
I don't think I can take it anymore."
He would get discouraged, he'd get frustrated, he'd get angry, but by the next morning, he'd kind of sleep it off, and the next day was a new day.
I think he felt that one -- he could transcend this provocation because he had a higher goal.
I mean, the goal was important to him.
The mission was important to him.
And he knew that he was holding himself in and constraining himself for a real purpose.
♪♪♪ -The Sporting News, which had opposed baseball's integration just a few years earlier, now named Robinson its very first "rookie of the year."
In a national poll, he was elected the second-most popular man in America after Bing Crosby.
Robinson led the league in stolen bases, led the Dodgers in home runs, and had a .297 batting average.
More people came to Ebbets Field that summer than at any time in its history, and he had helped drive the Brooklyn Dodgers to the pennant.
-♪ Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball?
♪ ♪ Did he hit it?
Yes, and that ain't all ♪ ♪ He stole home ♪ ♪ Yes, yes, Jackie's real gone ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball?
♪ ♪ Did he hit it?
Yes, and that ain't all ♪ ♪ He stole home... ♪ -"No other ballplayer on this club," said Dixie Walker, who had once wanted to quit rather than play alongside a Black man, "has done more to put the Dodgers up in the race.
He is everything Branch Rickey said he was."
-This is the old redhead, Red Barber, saying hello...
I have said that Robinson did more for me than I did for him.
I had to change my outlook on racial equations, because, being raised in the South, when the Black ballplayer came, I had to begin thinking differently, and I had to understand with clear eyes that I should and must accept him equally as I did other players.
So to me, it, uh... well, I said "matured me."
-The kind of moral suasion that you hope will take place does begin to take place, because people start asking questions -- "Why aren't there more?
Where'd you get him from?
Where's the pool?
What happened in the Black leagues?"
All those things begin to be questions, and so the system got questioned and challenged as a result of this.
-The most important Black person in American history is Martin Luther King.
A close second, I would argue, is Jackie Robinson, who came before Martin Luther King and began the consciousness-raising of whites and Blacks that resulted in Martin Luther King's career.
The heroism of Jackie Robinson, playing the game that requires such astonishing concentration and such equipoise -- a combination of relaxation and concentration -- to play it with his intensity under the pressures he felt on the field from racism, on the field from racism from the stands, off the field, to be -- the pressure to be, in the awful phrase of the day, "a credit to his race."
To do all that, all that he did under all that pressure is not just one of the great achievements in the annals of sport, but one of the great achievements of the human drama anywhere, any time.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -"Negro baseball ain't dead yet, not by a long shot.
It may not be as fat and sassy as it once was, or as robust at the gate, but it is still active, ambulatory."
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -There was euphoria that another bastion had fallen, but there was worry among the owners of the Negro League teams.
They knew from other examples, not just in baseball, that as soon as integration came, the focus in the Negro community would shift from the Negro League teams to "Oh, let's just see what Jackie does in the majors," and they knew it was just a matter of time before other Negro Leaguers or just Black ballplayers played for other major league teams.
That's exactly what happened, and the Negro Leagues started their inevitable slide downward.
-Negro League attendance dwindled away.
Black fans wanted to see Jackie Robinson play in the majors.
In Chicago, thousands turned out in their Sunday best to watch their hero play.
A train -- the Jackie Robinson Special -- ran all the way from Norfolk, Virginia, to Cincinnati, stopping to pick up fans along the way.
Overnight, the Dodgers had become Black America's favorite team.
-Oh, I rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
There's no question about that.
Yeah, the Dodgers were Black America's team, period.
That I am unequivocally sure about.
Yes.
♪♪♪ -There was a feeling of enormous pride in someone of my color finally doing something that, uh... that had the nation... had the nation's ear.
You know, everyone was talking about Jackie Robinson, the first Black athlete to play Major League Baseball, and daily, my father would get the newspapers to see exactly what Jackie was doing, and it was a great deal of pride.
[ Cheers and applause ] -Whoo!
[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪♪ -Frankie Masters and his Orchestra presents "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."
[ Big band music playing ] ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -In the fall of 1947, the Dodgers faced the Yankees in a hard-fought World Series, the first series in which an African-American had ever played.
Some of baseball's most famous stars attended the first game -- Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, even Ty Cobb.
[ Cheers and applause ] -Third inning.
Shea again walks Robinson, and the fleet-footed Dodger may have notions of trying to steal second again.
Shea watches him dance off first and tries to pick him off.
Look out, Robbie!
He's safe!
And now Shea accidentally drops the ball in another attempt to throw to first.
And it's a balk.
Umpire Babe Pinelli waves Robinson on to second.
-Robinson played well, but the most memorable moments involved two Italian-Americans.
The first was Dodger pinch hitter Cookie Lavagetto.
-Wait a minute.
Stanky is being called back from the plate, and Lavagetto goes up to hit.
The Yankees are ahead 2 to 1.
Gionfriddo, the pinch runner, is at second.
-It was game four, bottom of the ninth.
The Yankee pitcher was one out away from throwing a no-hitter.
-8 2/3 innings.
Two out, last of the ninth.
The pitch to Lavagetto, swung on and missed.
Fast ball.
It was in there.
Strike one.
Two men out, last of the ninth.
The pitch...swung on.
A drive hit out toward the right-field corner.
Henrich is going back.
He can't get it.
It's off the wall for a base hit.
Here comes the tying run.
And here comes the winning run!
[ Cheers and applause ] Fans, they're killing Lavagetto.
His own teammates, they're beating him to pieces.
-Bevens was within one out of a no-hit ballgame.
So when Lavagetto broke up his no-hitter, he scored the two runners and broke up the ballgame.
And I don't think there's ever been such a sound in Brooklyn as there was that was let loose when that ball hit the right-field fence.
-In the sixth inning of the sixth game, with the Dodgers leading 8-5, Joe DiMaggio came to bat with two men on.
Al Gionfriddo, nicknamed "The Little Italian," was playing left field.
-And the crowd well knows that one swing of this bat, this fella's capable of making it a brand-new game again.
Joe leans in.
Here's the pitch.
Swung on, belted, it's a long one.
Deep into left center.
Back goes Gionfriddo, back, back, back, back, back.
He makes a one-handed catch against the bull pen.
Oh, doctor.
He went exactly against the railing in front of the bull pen and reached up with one hand and took a home run away from DiMaggio.
[ Cheers and applause ] -And I will always remember seeing Gionfriddo holding up his black glove with the white spot in the center of it.
DiMaggio, thinking it was a home run, was coming into second base, and when he realized the ball had been caught, he stopped and kicked dirt and walked in tight circles out in center field.
I think it's one of the few times DiMaggio ever publicly was visibly upset.
-Seventh and final game, Yankee Stadium.
Page pitching for New York.
Ninth inning, Miksis on first, one out.
The left-hander takes the stretch, has a look at the runner, throws to Bruce Edwards, who swings.
It's a ground ball to Rizzuto.
Over to Stirnweiss for one out.
The relay to first.
It's a double play!
The Yanks win... -In the seventh game, the Yankees beat the Dodgers 5-2 for their 11th world championship.
-"If we must get racially conscious about it in determining the laurels of heroism, we'll have to pass the laurels to the players of Italian extraction.
In short, it has been a great series, no matter who your parents are."
Wendell Smith, Pittsburgh Courier.
-...Catch against the bull pen!
Oh, doctor!
-"I never threw an illegal pitch.
The trouble is, once in a while, I'd toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation."
Satchel Paige.
-On August 13, 1948, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, the oldest rookie ever to play baseball walked to the mound to start his first game in the majors for Bill Veeck's Cleveland Indians.
Leroy "Satchel" Paige had not been happy when Jackie Robinson and not he had been the first Black player signed for the majors, and this was clearly his last chance to show the white world what it had been missing all these years.
He was 42 years old... or 38 or 44... or 48... depending on whom he'd been talking to lately.
Employing masterful control and his whole arsenal of distinctive pitches, including what he called his single wind-up, triple wind-up, hesitation wind-up, no wind-up, step-and-pitch-it, sidearm throw, and bat dodger, he shut out the White Sox, then did it again a week later.
-"Paige has great difficulty proving that he was not pitching for the Indians when the pilgrims landed.
He is pitching stellar ball, treating the batters, most of whom are flushed with youth, as though they were simply babes in the baseball woods."
Wendell Smith, Pittsburgh Courier.
-A reporter once asked Paige if he had any regrets.
Very few, he said, but he was sorry he'd never got a chance to strike out Babe Ruth.
That year, the Indians won the World Series.
♪♪♪ -New York's Yankee Stadium, the house that Babe Ruth built, celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Stars from New York's 1923 world champions and other later-day Yankee heroes appear in a baseball tintype.
But biggest cheers from 50,000 fans go to the immortal star himself, Babe Ruth.
-On June 13, 1948, Yankee Stadium celebrated its first quarter century, and despite constant pain, the man who had christened it with a towering home run was determined to be on hand.
Ruth sat quietly while one by one, the other old-timers were introduced.
Then he started onto the field.
A sportswriter recalled that "he walked out into the cauldron of sound he must have known better than any other man."
-Looking thin and worn as a result of his long illness, the Bambino is still the game's greatest showman.
And nostalgia is thick in the vast stadium when he's greeted by another Yankee builder, Ed Barrow.
Today, the babe wears his old uniform for the last time.
His famous number 3 will never be worn by another Yankee player, but will go to America's baseball shrine at Cooperstown, New York.
For old times' sake, Babe takes a cut for the cameraman.
[ Cheers and applause ] The familiar stance and swing that once made him the most fearsome slugger of them all.
His 1927 record of 60 home runs still stands.
Yankee Stadium celebrates its birthday with one more salute to American baseball's greatest guy, Babe Ruth.
♪♪♪ -"All my obligations are over," he told his wife afterwards.
"I'm going to rest now.
I'm going to take it easy."
-And he handled his sickness very well.
Ford Frick, who was later commissioner of baseball, told me he went to see him the day before he died.
And he said he went in to see him, and he said it was an awful sight.
He said he was such a big man, and his arms were just little pipe stems.
And he said that awful voice.
He said, "You wanted to see me, Babe?"
And Babe said, "It's always good to see you, Ford."
Frick said it was just something to say, but he said it.
And then Frick said he left and went home, and the next day, he was dead.
And it was just a dying fall.
Everything left.
♪♪♪ -At 8:01 in the evening on August 16, 1948, Babe Ruth died of cancer.
♪♪♪ "I can't honestly say that I approve the way in which Ruth changed baseball," Ty Cobb wrote, "but he was the most natural and unaffected man I ever knew.
I look forward to meeting him again someday."
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ It was hot in New York, but 100,000 fans turned out to see him lie in state at Yankee Stadium.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ At the funeral, Ruth's old teammates had served as pallbearers.
"I'd give 100 bucks for an ice-cold beer," said Joe Dugan to Waite Hoyt.
Hoyt nodded.
"So would the babe."
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ -♪ Take me out to the ballgame ♪ ♪ Take me out with the crowd ♪ ♪ Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks ♪ ♪ I don't care ♪ ♪ If I ever get back ♪ ♪ 'Cause it's root, root, root for the home team ♪ ♪ If they don't win, it's a shame ♪ ♪ 'Cause it's one, two ♪ ♪ Three strikes, you're out ♪ ♪ At the old ballgame ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ 'Cause it's one, two ♪ ♪ Three strikes, you're out ♪ ♪ At the old ♪ ♪ Ballgame ♪ ♪♪♪ -Robinson waits.
Here comes the pitch.
And there goes a line drive to left field.
Slaughter's after it.
He leaps.
It's over his head.
Against the wall.
Here comes Gilliam scoring.
Brooklyn wins!
Jackie Robinson is being pummeled by his teammates.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Funding Provided By: General Motors Corporation; The National Endowment for the Humanities; The Pew Charitable Trusts; The Corporation for Public Broadcasting; The Public Broadcasting Service; Arthur Vining Davis Foundations