“Under Jackie’s Shadow:
Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind”
The author:
Mitchell Nathanson
The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press; 224 pages, $32.95; released April 1, 2024
The links:
The publishers website; the authors website; at Bookshop.org; at {pages}; at Powells.com; at Vromans.com; at TheLastBookStoreLA; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Amazon.com
The review in 90 feet or less
Once upon a time, a preferred method to go about “honoring Jackie Robinson” was to buy “useful and attractive trophies and sculptured reproductions.”
This company in New York could facilitate.
A star-struck kid had no real choice if he spent nickle after nickel trying to get a Robinson Topps card. With a couple extra quarters taped to a piece of cardboard, stick it in the mail and there would be mementos aplenty. In fact, the word “useful” is mentioned a few times in this advertisement above.
These days, it might be more useful (is that still not the right word?) to commit $135 for a replica Dodgers jersey – Brooklyn or Los Angeles – from the MLBShop, via the Nike branding. Pick a style and color that better fits the statement you want to convey.
Or go bigger — a $250 model set aside for those inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame produced by, of all names, Ebbets Field Flannels.
In 2022, the Dodgers had a Robinson giveaway gray flannel jersey that was nifty looking retro thing, available now on eBay (especially size Medium, which few can actually wear) and was “licensed by the estate of Jackie Robinson and Mrs. Rachel Robinson” with the website www.JackieRobinson.com attached to the front tail.
For today’s Jackie Robinson day, the trinket will be … a blue Brooklyn cap with a large “42” on the side.
There are other quality items out there as well from our favorite Baseballism.com — shirts that proclaim 42 is “more than a number” and “bigger than a game” these days. Robinson’s name isn’t even incorporated into the branding here. His family likely likes that approach.
Still, if only we can get out of the corporate shadow of what Jack(ie) Robinson Day has become.
Editor’s note: I’ve decided that as much as possible, we should refer to the man as Jack Robinson. That was his name. That’s his Hall of Fame plaque. The media added the “ie” to the end to try to soften his image way back. Last year, I reviewed the book “Call Him Jack: The Story of Jackie Robinson, Black Freedom Fighter” and make a conscious effort to stick by that.
In Mitch Nathanson’s new book, “Under Jackie’s Shadow,” he writes in the introduction about that October day in 1972 – 25 years after Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier – when Major League Baseball decided to give him a cursory recognition in Cincinnati. Red Barber did the introductions. Pee Wee Reese, Peter O’Malley, Joe Black and Larry Doby were also there.
It turned out to be Robinson’s last public appearance – he died nine days later.
Nathanson’s interest comes from snippets of a piece Ron Rapoport wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2022, leading up to the annual Jackie Robinson Day around the MLB, as Rapoport went back to 1972 and revealed a conversation he had with Robinson about his No. 42 retirement by the Dodgers that summer. It was an event I made my parents take me.
Robinson had resisted doing it – even though it was a ceremony joining Sandy Koufax and Roy Campanella at Dodger Stadium on a Sunday afternoon after an Old-Timers Day where the three eventually shared the spotlight.
Nathanson points out that by the late 1960s, “Robinson had become the unwitting protagonist of a narrative being told about both his sport and his country that he found discomforting … (it was a) contentious and oftimes ugly works-in-progress that were far from complete.” As for the number retirement, he cites Rapoport’s story with Robinson saying: “I couldn’t care less if someone is out there wearing 42.”
(Former Dodgers relief pitcher Ray Lamb may be snickering at that. In 1969, No. 42 was worn by Lamb, a rookie right-handed, glasses-wearing relief pitcher out of USC and Hoover High in Glendale. The next year, he was switched to No. 34. Would he be a sacrificial Lamb? He is the only Dodger to wear the number in the years after Robinson retired in 1957.)
Robinson also said what he was proud of his role in integrating the game, “I’m not subservient to it.”
Nathanson uses that as a jumping off point to introduce us to 13 men, many of whom were involved as minor-league players in the game in that 1972 window, before and after as well, who wanted to tell their stories through Nathanson’s interview process.
A couple of examples:
= Wil Aaron, the cousin of Henry Aaron whose family moved from Alabama to Los Angeles, made it as high a Double-A ball during his pro career between 1971 and 1976, ages 19 to 24, in the Baltimore and Cleveland organization. He came out of the Denker Park Little League, Manual Arts High and L.A. Valley College, was friends with the late Lymon Bostock (Can State Northridge, California Angels) as well as Ron Washington (the new Angels manager). Aaron says he had a tryout with the Angels but was told they were going with younger players as they needed a second baseman to replace Bobby Grich. Aaron wanted to be an infielder, but the organizations he was in kept trying to make him an outfielder – at 5-foot-8 and 155 pounds.
“The first thing they say, when they’re dumped in outfield, is that it’s because of their speed,” Aaron says. “Well, I don’t buy it. It’s called stacking. Stack them all in the outfield and don’t give them a chance to play infield. … It’s still done today.”
He then points out how the Boston Red Sox took Mookie Betts out of the infield – he had been a second baseman, but couldn’t break into a lineup with Dustin Pedroya – and when he came to the Dodgers as an All-Star right fielder, it’s somewhat interesting how they’ve now dedicated their lineup to moving him back to the infield.
Aaron also painfully explains how his cousin Henry did little to nothing to help his cause when he was trying to break into the big leagues, was producing numbers in the minors, but couldn’t get those who assess talent to believe in him.
= Ron Allen, the younger brother of MLB star Dick Allen, was one of the few who actually made it to the big leagues – seven games with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1972 at age 28, after nine minor league seasons. He had one big-league hit – a home run, in the ninth inning on Aug. 17 at San Diego, while playing first base in place of Joe Torre, who had been ejected in the eighth inning for scuffing a baseball in an argument with umpire Dick Stello (we wish we could see the video of that). Allen’s homer made the final score 3-2, Padres over Cardinals. Here’s the box score (with that eighth-inning description).
“My first two years I played in the Florida State League. I remember I had to stay on the bus when we traveled. We couldn’t go up to the restaurant and get a meal. You had to wait. Somebody had to bring you back a sandwich. I used to get so mad I couldn’t get off the bus at some of the places. And then we stayed over in the Black neighborhood. You know you didn’t stay in the hotel. In ’66, I played in Spartanburg in the Western Carolina League and, ooooh,, that was an experience. Because, man, you still saw signs of ‘Colored Only,’ ‘White Only …”
= Glen Sterling, who grew up in L.A. and didn’t play Little League or even high-school ball, somehow became connected as well with Lyman Bostock and a Detroit Tigers scout named Dan Crowley who helped get him involved, eventually sending him to Harbor Junior College as a first baseman and catcher, who then ended up playing in Mexico and whose statistical career isn’t readily available in Internet searches. Sterling, who got into coaching, said the “system” is what’s preventing Black players, even today, from advancing.
“The whole system is run by this old system, a racist system, and it’s going to continue because it continues to get passed down. I can’t say Major League Baseball isn’t doing anything. They took the All-Star Game out of Atlanta a couple years back. … Black Lives Matter has opened the door for a lot of vital discussion in those areas … You also have to look at colleges .. .there are almost no African Americans playing Division I baseball. Do you think that’s by choice? … I turn on the TV and watch these colleges play. UCLA doesn’t have any African Americans on their team. USC has, I think, maybe, one, at best. They need to give scholarships to these kids. … There are a lot of African Americans that could play in the big leagues if they could get the right chance. … I don’t hold any grudges and I’m not saying that I didn’t make it because I was discriminated again, because that wasn’t the case at all. … the racism and all that stuff didn’t personally affect me to the point where it affected my abilities. But you know it’s there and you gotta go through it. You just deal with it.”
Is all that true? It’s true to Sterling, and Allen, and Aaron. And more.
And that’s what still matters.
Author Q&A:
Nathanson explained in an email exchange some things he discovered along the way to this book project:
Q: Of the previous baseball-related books you’ve done, it would seem as if this was a natural progression from “God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen” from 2016, since Allen’s younger brother, Ron, is one of the 13 subjects you were able to speak with. Was that were the most thrust for this project came from?
A: Actually, no. While “Under Jackie’s Shadow” is a natural progression from the Dick Allen book, it was somebody else from that book who led me to this: Mickey Bowers. I wrote about him briefly in the Allen book and mentioned a scouting report the Phillies had on him which essentially said to stay away from him because they didn’t want another Dick Allen on their hands (they should have been so fortunate). Through happenstance I was able to speak to him a few years after the Allen book came out and he told me his story and remarked that while Allen certainly had his difficulties, he had superstar talent so he was going to make it regardless. But what about players like Mickey Bowers? What happens to them? He was upset that nobody knows the stories of the players who suffered the same indignities as superstar players such as Allen, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, etc. but who didn’t have the talent that enabled them to power through regardless. Those players – players like him, he said – become invisible and washed out of the system. It’s as if they never existed. Anyway, I listened to him speak and realized that he was right – these stories are important and need to be told. So I decided to try to do that.
Q: Aside from that, did any of your other baseball books – maybe “A People’s History of Baseball” in 2012 – funnel anything into the perspective of this project? Maybe even “Understanding Baseball” in 2015?
A: Yes, “A People’s History of Baseball” was another thread that led to this book. While researching and writing that one I realized that the narrative of baseball that most of us have ingested is simply one narrative of many potential ones and there are many reasons why we choose to invest in one narrative over another. But once you change the perspective you start to see things differently. Which is a lot of what Under Jackie’s Shadow is about — looking at the game from the perspective of these players who were good enough to make it into Organized Baseball but perhaps not quite good enough to overcome all of the obstacles that were put in their way simply because of the color of their skin.
Q: How did you decide which players to track down for this – and was Ron Allen one of the first to figure out what you were trying to accomplish here?
A: Tracking down the players was by far the most difficult part of this. After all, they’re career minor leaguers so nobody knows who they are. A few of them had cups of coffee in the bigs and maybe they had a famous sibling or siblings (Ron Allen had Dick and Aaron Pointer’s sisters were the Pointer Sisters) but otherwise I had never heard of any of them, and I’m sure most baseball fans haven’t either. So how to find people you don’t even know exist? Good luck with that. Thankfully I was able to get leads from one player to the next and that’s mostly how I did it. For example, Mickey Bowers gave me the names of a couple of other guys and then when I spoke to them they gave me names of a couple of guys they knew and so on. But I also cold-called some of the guys after seeing their name in an article, usually about someone else. It was far easier to get a player to trust me with his story if I was referred to him by someone he knew, obviously. I reached out to many players who just didn’t want to speak to me – a total stranger – about their careers, which I completely understand. But a handful were willing to open up about this stuff and I’m grateful for their openness and their trust in me.
Q: Are you still contemplating a book about Frank Robinson, who eventually became the first Black manager in MLB history – and is quoted in this book by Wil Aaron as saying the Cleveland Indians were “racist”?
A: Not really. That was going to be my next project and I actually did some preliminary work on it – reaching out to people and so forth – but decided to do something else because quite frankly I was worn out after doing the Bouton book and wasn’t looking for another project where I would have to deal with difficult family members. I had just about had it with that dynamic after completing Bouton and was looking for something that didn’t require me to play referee/therapist/mediator within another family’s toxic dynamic. I was done with that. Still am, most likely.
Q: What was the most profound thing you took away from these interviews?
A: That these guys, who had very difficult and awful experiences within Organized Baseball, still somehow managed to still love the game itself. I would have thought they’d have been completely turned off by anything having to do with baseball but while a few mentioned how difficult it was for them to watch Major League Baseball for a while after they were done with the game, they all seemed to come back to it in one way or another. That’s a testament to the sort of pull the game has on some people. No matter how hard the people who run baseball try to ruin everything about it, they ultimately fail because the game, itself, is that great.
Q: Were there any people you tried to track down for this but weren’t able to?
A: I had hundreds of names but most of the contact information was incomplete or inaccurate or whatever. And then there were the dozens of former players I did make contact with who declined to be interviewed, which, as I said, I completely understand. And then there were the ones who were very enthusiastic about speaking with me and we’d set up dates to talk but then something always came up or they’d put it off. That was frustrating but it’s their lives and their stories and it’s their decision to share them with me or not. And if they ultimately decided not to, that’s more than fine with me because I didn’t want anybody to do anything they’d be uncomfortable with. In the end I was able to compile a baker’s dozen of fascinating life stories, which is a baker’s dozen more than I thought I’d get when I started out on this.
Q: Explain the thought process behind the illustrations that go with some of the essays? What kind of context do you think they add?
A: Those were done by my daughter, Jackie, who is an artist and art history major at Villanova. The idea behind them was for them to convey a moment or feeling that stood out in a particular player’s story. That can be difficult to pinpoint because the transcripts of my interviews could run upwards of 20,000 words (sometimes more, if I recall correctly) and out of all that it’s not easy to decipher a singular image that conveys the essence of a particular player’s story. After I’d edited down the transcripts and transformed them into the narratives you see within the book, Jackie and I would go through them to try to decide what might work, what might be something that could effectively be captured visually, those sort of things. Eventually we would come up with a few different moments within a given narrative and then Jackie would decide which of those moments would work best visually on the page. As for what the images add, I think they render tangible some of the ideas/moments that might otherwise pass the reader by as he or she is reading the narrative. For example, it’s one thing to talk about just how self-conscious you might feel as the only Black person in a white town walking into a white barbershop asking for a haircut (as the former Detroit Tigers farmhand Chuck Stone does within the book) but it really hits home when you see it represented in Jackie’s illustration of an individual sitting in the barber’s chair with the hands of seemingly the entire town pressed up against the barbershop window. The idea of being the center of a crowd’s attention but feeling utterly alone really comes across in that illustration, I think.
Q: Some of the players speak of Black Lives Matter and moving the MLB All Star Game out of Atlanta as a way of trying to be socially aware of situations. In light of the annual Jackie Robinson Day events around Major League Baseball, what does the year 2024 bring to you as far as something tangible that he’s still making an impact with something he did more than 75 years ago now? (And maybe this is something we can revisit in a couple of months, just prior to the ’24 JR Day festivities).
A: I think according to Ron Rapoport, who has a great piece on this at the 2023 edition of NINE and who also wrote about this in the L.A. Times, Jackie Robinson would have hated Jackie Robinson Day, so there’s that aspect to it that I think is important. I don’t want to put words in my subjects’ mouths but I suspect they as well might not be so thrilled with the way Baseball pats itself on the back every April 15th because it seems to give Baseball a pass on all of the ways it has continued to perpetrate wrongs even in the years/decades post-Robinson. And their stories as told within Under Jackie’s Shadow are the concrete proof of that.
Q: I also find it … ironic? …. The Dodgers are now having Mookie Betts move from the outfield to the infield on a more regular basis, as the Red Sox decided he wouldn’t replace Dustin Pedroia when he was coming up so they, ahem, stuck him in the outfield. Interesting how the Dodgers could be making a “Jackie Robinson” move here with Betts – and for “Jackie Robinson Day” Betts could be wearing No. 42 and playing 2B?
A: Yeah, maybe, but Betts is the exception that proves the rule. He’s an otherworldly talent who could play pretty much anywhere and excel. He’s a future Hall of Famer. But so many MLB players made the Majors because they excelled at their position but probably couldn’t have made it playing somewhere else. Which is what made/makes positional segregation so debilitating to so many Black players – it pushed them into a few positions and eliminated their opportunities to excel at perhaps their best position. As a result, we’ve seen the paltry number of Black players that we’ve seen for decades. There isn’t any single reason for those low numbers but positional segregation is one that few people talk about but which is particularly odorous simply for the basic math of it all – whereas while white prospects have nine positions to choose from in order to maximize their abilities, Black prospects might have only three. The results of that math speak for themselves.
An excerpt:
Howard Cole was allowed to print an excerpt of Nathansen’s book for his Substack.com platform and picked the chapter focused on Chuck Stone, who explains in Chapter 13 of the book how he grew up in the Crenshaw District, went to East L.A. College, then was a teammate of Lyman Bostock on Cal State Northridge’s 1970 D-II College World Series (Stone was the series MVP) and skipped his senior year to sign with the Detroit Tigers organization. He also was involved with John Young in starting the RBI program.
How it goes in the scorebook
Poetry in truth, honesty and documented now for our reflection.
The poetry element isn’t lost on Nathanson either. At the start of each of the 13 chapters, he extracts a quote from the player and frames it in a poetic presentation.
In the afterward, he explains how through the funny, tragic, uplifting stories told he had some “found poetry” in arranging the prose “to convey the texture of what I heard … (I) believe that the poetic rendering of their verbal prose comes closest to delivering both the power of their voice and the power of the response it engendered within me.”
You can look it up: More to ponder
The annual roundup of Robinson-related books continues with:
== “Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson,” by Dorian Hairston (University of Kentucky Press, 112 pages, released Feb. 6, 2024). A book of poems by a former Kentucky baseball player (2013-16) part of the Affrilachian Poets Society.
It starts with this on page 3:
“Manifesto for Black Baseball Players”
never forget the 42 reasons
baseball is best played with color
steal bases like they
stole this country
break into record books
turn more than just they ink black
pretend the ball is named
jim crow
(de)colonize
the hall of fame
remember we gave the game
lights, helmets, and style
never be controlled
by anything white
belt “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
during they national anthem
find you a Helen drop down on one knee
place a baseball field on her fourth finger
Also this from a poem “The Original Dodgers”
Jackie Robinson was
never the first black Dodger.
we done dodged balls for centuries
rent, lynch mobs, overseers, slave catchers,
waded through fixed elections, and rivers,
done outrun horses and bloodhounds,
even dodged some bullets a few times.
but here soon we might turn ourselves into
Josh Gibson and america will find us in a 2-0
standing with a straight spine
inside the batter’s box
towering over the plate
waiting for they next pitch
waiting for they next mistake
and we guarantee it won’t come back.
The book lines up with a story from USA Today last February: Why are there no Black catchers in MLB? Backstop prospects hoping to change perception.
== “Larry Doby: The Story of a Baseball Pioneer,” by Jerry Izenberg (Sports Publishing, 256 pages, $25.99, released March 26).
The 1998 Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, and the first Black player in the American League, helping the 1948 Cleveland Indians win the World Series, is profiled by Izenberg, who saw Doby play with the Newark Eagles as a youngster and became friends with him later.
On Dec. 13, 2023, Doby was given the Congressional Gold Medal. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement: “This is a proud day for Major League Baseball as Hall of Famer Larry Doby posthumously receives the Congressional Gold Medal. After starring for the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League and serving in the Navy during World War II, Larry Doby became the American League’s first African American player with the Cleveland Indians in 1947. He soon established himself as a perennial All-Star slugger whose excellence on the field led him to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Larry Doby will forever be remembered as a pioneer who demonstrated great character and courage throughout his life. His legacy as a trailblazing player and manager endures to this day, and he will always remain one of the great heroes that our national pastime and nation have ever known.”
== “The Integration of Minor League Baseball: A History and Player Register, 1946-1959,” by Rick Swain and Gary Fink (McFarland, 288 pages, due Aug. 11, 2024).
== “A League of Her Own: A Novel,” by Kaia Alderson. Based on the life of Effa Manley, a Black woman with a dream who wound up with a baseball team.
**********
Our reviews of Nathanson’s previous books:
= “Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original” in 2022
= “God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen” in 2016, which we couldn’t retrieve in full from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine but we have this top part.
= “A People’s History of Baseball” in 2012, again, just the top part from the Internet Archive WaybackMachine, but we have this top part.
We’ll finish with this
This artistic interpretation of Robinson has been part of an exhibit of the work by the artist Henry Taylor, called “A Jack Move – Proved It” from 2011.
Taylor had an exhibition called “B Side” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from October 2023 through January of 2024, following a run from November 2022 to October 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. (MOCA).
The Whitney website says in the online bio about the 65-year-old Taylor, who was born in Ventura and grew up in Oxnard, attending California Institute of the Arts: “For more than thirty years, the Los Angeles–based artist has portrayed people from widely different backgrounds—family members, friends, neighbors, celebrities, politicians, and strangers — with a mixture of raw immediacy and tenderness. His improvisational approach to artmaking is hinted at in this exhibition’s title … it refers to the side of a record album that often contains lesser-known, more experimental songs. Taylor’s paintings, executed quickly and instinctually from memory, newspaper clippings, snapshots, and in-person sittings, are variously light-hearted, intimate, and somber.
(Taylor) worked at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital as a psychiatric technician on the night shift. After graduating from CalArts in 1995 and moving to downtown Los Angeles, Taylor became a mainstay of the burgeoning art community there and a leading influence on the rise of figurative painting.
In them, he combines flat planes of bold, sensuous color with areas of rich, intimate detail and loose brushstrokes to create paintings that feel alive. Guided by a deep-seated empathy for people and their lived experiences, Taylor captures the humanity, social milieu, and mood of his subjects, whose visceral presence is heightened by their closely cropped, often life-size images. In working from personal experience and shared history, Taylor offers a view of everyday life in the United States that is grounded in the experiences of his own community, including the incarceration, poverty, and often deadly interactions with police that disproportionately affect Black Americans. Deeply steeped in art history, his work forms a continuum with the expressive figurative painting and politically engaged work of European and American artists from Max Beckmann to Bob Thompson, Philip Guston, and Alice Neel.
As for the Robinson piece, the description on AEQAI.org, a monthly arts journal, explains:
The Jackie Robinson painting is a deft example of the artist’s experimentalism. This view should be familiar, depicting a famous image of Robinson sliding into home plate. His hat floats off backwards. Taylor imbues the image with the kind of grit that Robinson played with. Some techniques here recall the street culture of Basquiat’s style like the words at the top that read “A Jack Move,” and areas of the canvas that are left void of brown paint. The painting doesn’t have a unified background, as patches are left unpainted and unrefined. Robinson’s face is also left without much detail, perhaps to grant him an everyman aura. Viewers can see themselves in such an important icon of baseball and black history. Taylor uses formal technique to bring the legend of Jackie Robinson down to Earth, reminding us of the humanity of his character that continues to endure and appeal to us today.
Wonder of the Dodgers ever considered handing out nice copy prints of this instead of another trivial trinket?
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