Remembering Jackie Robinson

In conjunction with Black History Month, BaseballSacramento.com looks at Sacramento-area ballplayers Spider Jorgensen, Wally Westlake, Bruce Edwards, Dusty Baker and Duane Pillette who played with and played against Jackie Robinson and was influenced by the ordeals of his quest in 1947 to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball.  

Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey had a grand plan. He was a visionary, so far ahead of his time that the idea of an African American playing Major League Baseball was inconceivable.   

Rickey scouted the country, searching for the right man. He envisioned that man would have the ability to be a major league ballplayer and, even more, a man who had the ability to withstand racial prejudices that came with the pulse of times.  

In 1945, Rickey found Jackie Robinson playing for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League. As impressed as Rickey was with Robinson's baseball talent, he was even more impressed with his personal makeup. But, for what Rickey had in mind, he knew Robinson would need more.   

The two men met in late August that year. Rickey put Robinson through an intense three-hour dramatization to test his mental toughness and tolerance. Rickey tested the 26-year-old in worst-case scenarios that could arise at hotels, restaurants and ball-parks in each major league city. He shouted obscenities, insults and racial slurs. He did it just to see how Robinson would react.  

Robinson, an educated man having attended UCLA and an officer in the military, had experienced it all before and knew what to expect. He kept his composure and passed the test, prompting Rickey to offer the importance of life's simple rule of "turning the other cheek."   

Rickey asked Robinson for three years of patience and forbearance to make what would be called "Baseball's Great Experiment" work. A month later, Robinson would agree to a contract with Brooklyn to play for the Montreal Royals, the club's Triple-A minor league affiliate.  

Robinson, who died October 24, 1972, made his major league debut at first base with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947 against the Boston Braves. There was a Sacramento-area presence that day with teammates Spider Jorgensen making his major league debut at third base and Bruce Edwards in his second season behind the plate. 

Jorgensen’s biggest concern that day wasn’t that an African American was breaking the color barrier of America’s greatest game. His biggest concern was whether or not he’d have a glove to use in the game. 

A day earlier, Jorgensen, who graduated from Folsom High School in 1936, thought he was going to be spending another year in the minor leagues. He was expecting to join the Royals, when they opened the season in Syracuse, New York. But injuries to infielders Cookie Lavagetto and Arky Vaughn left the Dodgers in need of a third baseman. So Jorgensen, 27, stayed in Brooklyn. However, his shoes, glove and bats were en route to Syracuse.

“I came to Ebbets Field on Opening Day, scared to death,” Jorgensen said in an interview with Geoff Smith of the Los Angeles Daily Bulletin. “I didn’t think I was going to play. I didn’t have any equipment with me. My glove, bats, everything else went to Syracuse because the Montreal club opened up there. Then Jackie comes over and says ‘Here, use my second base glove.’ He was going to play first base. So I used his glove and borrowed a pair of spikes. I was so scared, but Jackie helped me relax.” 

Jorgensen went 0 for 3 with a run batted in batting seventh that day. Robinson was also 0 for 3 and scored a run batting second. 

Jorgensen got along with Robinson but never got real close. They were teammates from 1946 until Jorgensen went to the New York Giants in the middle of the 1950 season. He remembered Robinson’s tolerance those first two seasons and recalled how Robinson finally lashed back in 1949.

“I got to know him as well as anybody,” Jorgensen told Smith. “I never went over to his house and had dinner ... he never came to our place. But things were a little different then. You didn’t chum around with those guys. You didn’t room with them. There was a separation but that’s the way times were. If you started running around with those guys or said you wanted to room with them, they’d call you a ‘Nigger Lover.’”

Jorgensen told Smith he wasn’t aware of the off-the-field racial incidents Robinson endured that season. For example, he wasn’t aware that a Philadelphia hotel didn’t want Robinson to stay there until years later when he read about it in a book.

“Mind you, I didn’t know what was going on,” said Jorgensen, who died in 2003 in Rancho Cucamonga. “I was struggling, too. I was just a rookie. I was worried about myself.”

On the field, Jorgensen recalled the unruly treatment Robinson received from the Philadelphia Phillies led by a barrage of verbal assaults from manager Ben Chapman. “They really ragged on him. Oh, my God, but he took it. The word spread that he’s not supposed to do anything but just play. And that he did. He took that crap.”

There were many major leaguers and a number of Dodgers players angry about Robinson joining the team. In an article during spring training, Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier asked Dodger players to speak out about Robinson. The responses he received didn’t suggest acceptance, rather a tolerance.  

Bruce Edwards, who during a spring training game against the Royals in Cuba, was reported to have “deliberately” run into Robinson covering first base and knocked him out, didn’t give a glowing endorsement of his teammate.  

“He is alright,” said the Sacramento High School product. “Whatever Rickey says, he will do.” 

In Pittsburgh, Wally Westlake, an outfielder out of Sacramento's Christian Brothers High School, was also making his major league debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The two crossed paths many times that season, causing the now 90-year-old Westlake to reflect on the tribulations of the time.  

Westlake said over time Robinson's presence reshaped public opinion of the African American ballplayer and human being. 

“They always talk about Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. I always thought he put a little crack in society,” Westlake told BaseballSacramento.com editor Rick Cabral. “He was a bit of a red ass. When he ran out in the middle of that square circle, he let you know one thing: ‘Boys, I'm here today to kick your can. That’s what I’m going to do.’ And, that’s what he did.” 

There were other ballplayers who felt the same way Westlake and Jorgensen did toward the African American player. 

In 1946, Duane Pillette, whose father Herman Pillette resided in Sacramento and played 26 years in the minor leagues including three with the Sacramento Solons from 1943-45, was in his first year of professional baseball. He was a pitcher for the Newark Bears of the International League. The second week of the season, the visiting Expos played the Bears. Robinson hit the Bears’ pitching staff well. “He must have hit .800 against our pitchers,” Pillette said in the book How To Be Like Jackie Robinson: Life Lessons From Baseball’s Greatest Hero by Pat Williams. “I was fortunate I didn’t pitch in the series.” 

When the series was over, Newark manager George Selkirk gave instructions to his pitching staff that the next time they played against the Expos, the first pitcher to start the series was to hit Robinson or it would cost him $50. 

Pillette pitched that first game. He was making only $400 and the thought of losing $50 was a stiff price to pay for not following orders. When Robinson came to bat, the manager gave the signal to throw at him. 

“I thought it was wrong,” Pillette said. “So, I came close with my first three pitches, but Jackie, thank God, moved good. My next pitch was in the dirt at his feet.” 

Following the base on balls, while Robinson was leading off first base, Pillette threw over to keep him close and accidently hit him in the ankle. 

“When I retired the side, I told the manager, ‘Skip, I missed at the plate but got him at first,’” Pillette said. “He looked at me with an unbelieving eye and said, ‘Yeah, I guess you saved fifty bucks kid.’ What a relief.”  

Cincinnati Reds manager Dusty Baker, the most successful African American manager in the history of Major League Baseball, was three-sport star at Del Campo High School athlete in the mid-1960s.  As a boy, his father John Baker who passed away last year, made the young Baker watch the film “The Jackie Robinson Story.” To this day, Dusty Baker, who was 23 years old when Robinson passed away, keeps two framed photographs of Robinson at his home. 

“I try to put into practice what Jackie stood for - tolerance without acceptance,” Baker said in Williams’ book. “As a manager, I get a lot of derogatory racial mail, and I simply think of all that Jackie went through and how he would respond.” 

Robinson changed baseball forever. And, Westlake, an opponent and admirer, said it best. 

“I always said the good Lord put him on this world for a purpose and he fulfilled it pretty good.”

We Are the Ship
By author/artist Kadir Nelson

In 2008, Nelson published his book, "We Are the Ship" that tells the story of the Negro Leagues through his words and paintings. Said Nelson in an interview with BBCWorld News America: "The story of the Negroe Leagues is a story of pride, determination and perseverance, and excellence amid adversity."

Nelson graciously gave permission to reprint two of his paintings, both of which feature Jackie Robinson, who we are commemorating this February as part of Black History Month.

To visit Nelson's web site and/or purchase his book, click here.

Westlake Part of MLB Trivia
by Editor Rick Cabral

On Aug. 26, 1947, Wally Westlake became an historical footnote in baseball history as his Pittsburgh Pirates drubbed the Dodgers 16-3.  

In his first two at bats, Westlake smoked a 3-run homer and then later hit a 2-run double. The next time up, he faced Dodgers' reliever Dan Bankhead, who made history that day by becoming the first African American pitcher to appear in a Major League Baseball game.

Bankhead soon earned another unique distinction.  

"That was something that day," Westlake vividly remembers. "We were in Brooklyn. They had just brought (Bankhead) up from Montreal. He was a pretty good sized rascal. (Had a) pretty good hummer, with a little tail on it. He got one inside on me and I couldn't get away from it. He just about relieved my left arm at the elbow!" Westlake laughs.

The 90-year-old Westlake then lowers his voice to simulate the hush that came over the dugouts and the crowd. 'What's gonna happen now?' seemed to be the reaction throughout the ballpark. "I didn't give a shit," Wally admits about being hit by a black player. "I just tossed my bat aside and run on down to first base."  

After the game, a sportswriter asked Westlake what he thought about being the first white batter to be struck by a Negro pitcher in a major league game. "'White guys hit me all the time,'" he replied at the time. "What was I supposed to do: go out there and have a fit? So I got popped, it didn't bother me." 

Asked if Bankhead may have been sending a message, since Westlake had already collected five RBI, he responded "Not in a game that wild."  

Ironically, Bankhead came up later that afternoon and hit a home run his first time up. In one afternoon, the Dodger rookie made major league baseball history by becoming the first African American to pitch in a game, hit a white batter, and homer in his first at bat. 

It turns out Bankhead was not the first Negro pitcher Westlake had ever faced.  

Once, in the minor leagues, he came to bat in a 1942 exhibition game against Satchell Paige, who fronted a barnstorming team. Westlake grounded out.

Asked to describe Paige's velocity, Westlake said it wasn't as dominant as Bob Feller's fastball. But, he added, Satchell had good stuff and excellent control. He wonders what Paige would have accomplished had he come along a little later. 

From that experience Westlake gained greater respect for black players.