[BACKGROUND NOTE: This is a letter I wrote to the Wall St Journal discussing an article published in WSJ. The 20 Aug 2022 WSJ article followed a similar 13 Aug story by ESPN. Each author expressed skepticism about a famous story in Jackie Robinson’s early career as the first black player in Major League Baseball. As the story goes, fans are booing Jackie as he warms up for an early road game, when legendary Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese runs over and saves the moment by putting an arm around Jackie, stopping the booing, and calming the fans.

The story is so good it has been retold in several books and movies and made into a statue in Brooklyn . The ESPN and WSJ authors provide evidence that the incident may not have occured in Cincinnati on 13 May 1947 as recounted years later by ex-Dodger pitcher Rex Barney, and affirmed by legendary sports writer Lester Rodney.

The gist of both articles is: if this event did not occur on that date, maybe this magnificent story of human brotherhood loses some (or all) of its meaning. Despite ESPN presenting solid evidence on 13 August that the story probably DID occur in 1948 in Boston, the WSJ ran their story under the headline: “The Hug That Jackie Robinson Never Received” .

My goal in writing to WSJ was to counter what seemed to me (yet another) woke attempt to re-write history and show white guys as worse than they really were. Also, my letter recounts a similar, and better, story that occurred about the same time in Cleveland and included photographic evidence. My guess is that a similar story occurred at many times and places in 1947-1949. ]

Doby’s Hug Better Than Jackie’s

Your Aug 20-21 WSJ article headline “The Hug That Jackie Robinson Never Received” likely needs to be retracted.  The three-picture WSJ article by Jonathan Eig’s does not agree with the headline.  The article says, instead, that the famous on-field, pre-game hug by (southern white guy) Pee Wee Reese of Jackie Robinson “at least didn’t happen the way so many people would like to think it did”.   The gist of the article is that Rex Barney (who later told the story in a biography) couldn’t have seen Pee Wee hug Jackie in Cincinnati in 1947 at the beginning of a game, because Rex Barney was in the bullpen for that game, plus other sources had reported that Jackie had a good experience in Cincinnati and was “the toast of the town”.  Eig ends the article by reporting that Rachel Robinson (who, by the way, never went on the road with Jackie) didn’t think the hug really happened, and thought the story did a disservice to Jackie, because it implied that some white folks were on his side.     

Eig makes no reference to an earlier ESPN story (Aug 13) saying the hug probably didn’t happen in Cincinnati in 1947, but may have happened in 1948.  ESPN also mentions that Rex Barney would have been in the bullpen that day, and only reported the hug in a book 40 years later.  According to ESPN, not mentioned in the WSJarticle, a second eye-witness to the famous hug was legendary reporter Lester Rodney who swore it happened, but only wrote about it later.

Recognizing that Barney and Rodney told the story later, after watching 100’s of games, it is easy to understand how they might have gotten the date wrong.  But it is hard to believe that they made it up, especially Lester Rodney, an illustrious reporter of the time, who was not known for applying sugar coating to stories.  According to Wikipedia: “Rodney was given wide discretion by his employer, (the communist Daily Worker) in his sports writing, permitted to criticize baseball, America, and Hitler …”

The most reasonable conclusion is that Pee Wee hugging Jackie happened some other time.  WJS writer Eig does not like the story, because as he says, “It credits the white establishment with benevolence, it didn’t earn.”  Besides the bad grammar, Eig is getting on a woke soapbox here.  The white establishment (in the north) was cheering for Jackie.    Time Magazine had a famous cover story celebrating Jackie Robinson’s success 22 Sep 1947.

If ESPN or Eig really wanted to find out whether any white folks were cheering for black ballplayers in 1947-48, they were looking in the wrong place.  Both articles reported it was hard to get facts, because New York papers in 1947-1948 limited themselves to details of the games and didn’t venture into social implications.

If they had checked out the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1947, they would have found top editors Gordon Cobbledick and the Alsop brothers cheering for Doby on the editorial page the moment he donned a Tribe uniform.  Doby played poorly in 1947, but in 1948, he started on his path to the Hall of Fame.  In game 4 of the 1948 World Series, Larry Doby hit the game-winning homer, and got a famous hug from Indians pitcher Steve Gromek. (Famous in Cleveland, but apparently unknown in NYC.)   We know it happened, because the Cleveland Plain Dealer printed it the next day.  Not only did it happen, nobody could look at the picture and think it was inauthentic or staged.

Like so much in sports, nobody heard about it if it didn’t happen in New York, Boston, or LA. 

According to his biography, Doby cherished the photograph for the rest of his life. “The picture was more rewarding and happy for me than actually hitting that home run,” he said.  Speaking at the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994, Doby said: ”That was a feeling (about the photo) from within, the human side of two people, one black and one white,” he said. ”That made up for everything I went through. I would always relate back to that whenever I was insulted or rejected from hotels. I’d always think about that picture. It would take away all the negatives.”

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