While we wait for baseball to return, Joe Posnanski will count down his top 60 moments in baseball history — think of it as a companion piece to The Baseball 100 — with a series of essays on the most memorable, remarkable and joyous scenes of the game. This project will not contain more words than “Moby Dick,” but we hope you enjoy it.
[Editors note: 60 Moments will be taking a short break following this essay and will resume the week of June 8. See you then.]
Pee Wee Reese puts his arm around Jackie Robinson
May 13, 1947
A few years ago, I dived deep into a question: Did Pee Wee Reese really put his arm around Jackie Robinson in Cincinnati that day in 1947? You might have seen the sculpture of Reese and Robinson at the entrance of MCU Park at Coney Island. You might have seen the moment in the film “42.”
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“Thank you, Jackie,” Reese said.
“What are you thanking me for?” Robinson asked.
“I’ve got family here from Louisville up there somewhere. I need them to see who I am.”
You might have heard Red Barber tell the story in Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary.
“The first time the Dodgers showed up in Cincinnati, there was a very hostile crowd,” he said.
“Cincinnati is just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, and Pee Wee is from Louisville, a Southerner, the 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 Jackie 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.'”
Over time, though, Burns dramatically changed his mind about this incident and became perhaps the most prominent advocate of the belief that the embrace definitely did not happen. On his side of the argument, there is almost no tangible evidence it happened other than a couple of people such as Barber who claimed to have seen it. Nobody wrote about it in the newspapers, not even in the black press, which traditionally covered stories like that. Robinson did not mention it in his 1948 biography “My Own Story” — Reese got no special mention in that book at all. It is not featured in the 1950 movie “The Jackie Robinson Story,” though it’s exactly the sort of scene that movie would have loved to feature.
In his documentary specifically about Jackie Robinson, Burns turned to the writer Jonathan Eig, whose terrific book “Opening Day” concludes that while it’s possible the Cincinnati embrace happened, it’s very unlikely.
Eig’s words on screen serve not only as his own but also as Burns’ final word on the subject:
“We want to feel like white people had something to do with this,” Eig said, “that we were open-minded and that we saw what was right, and we wanted to make it happen. And Pee Wee Reese is our symbol for that. We all want to be the one that’s wise enough to see what we can do better as a country. So the myth serves a really nice purpose. Unfortunately, it’s a myth.”
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As the years pass by, I must concede that the question of whether it happened has become less interesting to me. For one thing, while the evidence is scant that it happened in Cincinnati in 1947, there’s a lot of evidence from Robinson himself that something similar happened at some point, perhaps in Boston in 1948.
From Robinson’s autobiography, “I Never Had It Made”:
“In Boston during a period when the heckling pressure seemed unbearable, some of the players began to heckle Reese. They were riding him about being a Southerner and playing ball with a black man. Pee Wee didn’t answer them. Without a glance in their direction, he left his position and walked over to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and began talking to me. His words weren’t important. I don’t even remember what he said. It was the gesture of comradeship and support that counted. As he stood talking with me with a friendly arm around my shoulder, he was saying loud and clear, ‘Yell. Heckle. Do anything you want. We came here to play baseball.'”
Robinson told a similar story in 1949 to the Brooklyn Eagle:
“I’ll never forget the day when a few loud-mouthed guys on the other team began to take off on Pee Wee Reese. They were joshing him very viciously because he was playing on the team with me and was on the field nearby. Mind you, they were not yelling at me; I suppose they did not have the nerve to do that, but they were calling him some very vile names and every one bounced off of Pee Wee and hit me like a machine-gun bullet.
“Pee Wee kind of sensed the hopeless, dead feeling in me and came over and stood beside me for a while. He didn’t say a word, but he looked over at the chaps who were yelling at me through him and just stared. He was standing by me, I could tell you that. Slowly the jibes died down, like when you kill a snake an inch at a time, and then there was nothing but quiet from them. It was wonderful the way this little guy did it. I will never forget it.”
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So it happened, even if it didn’t happen exactly the way it has been told.
But what I think about is a different question: Why should this story so resonate through the years that people still argue about it? Why has this small kindness — so small, you wouldn’t even notice it — become such a powerful (and argued-about) moment in baseball history?
I mean, Pee Wee Reese was Jackie Robinson’s teammate. He was, by all accounts, a decent man. Why would we still celebrate Reese more than 75 years later for doing nothing more than walking over to a teammate and offering a few kind words (and maybe putting his hand on his shoulder)?
I have my own theory, and it is this: Doing the right thing against the tide, even in the smallest way, is hard. It is uncommon. There were so few heroes around the league helping along in the early days of integration. Branch Rickey (and then Bill Veeck) were very much out on an island. Robinson came to the Dodgers in 1947, and Larry Doby came to Cleveland.*
*Willard Brown and Hank Thompson joined St. Louis that same year, but it was a publicity stunt and they were soon sent back to the Negro Leagues. There was not another black player in St. Louis until 1954.
No new teams integrated in 1948.
The Giants were the only new team to integrate in 1949.
The Boston Braves were the only new team to integrate in 1950. The Red Sox, with Hall of Famer owner Tom Yawkey running things, would not integrate for another nine years.
And so on.
Teams didn’t jump in and sign black players. The White Sox integrated Chicago baseball in 1951 with Minnie Miñoso, but it wasn’t until 1953 that a Chicago team would have an African American player; that’s when the Cubs brought in Ernie Banks. The Yankees didn’t have a black player until 1955.
The resistance to black players in baseball went on well into the 1960s. During that time, there were blatant and outspoken racists, sure, but so much more, there were those who watched from the sidelines and chose to believe their silence could stand in place of support. When pressed, some would say they were absolutely for integration, but, you know, it takes time — people’s attitudes must be changed, teams need to find the right black players, everybody just needs to be patient.
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Patience. This was the charged word that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to write his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
“For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait,'” he wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.'”
In the midst of all this, Pee Wee Reese — a Southerner raised in an openly racist family — did not stand on the sideline. “Pee Wee from the outset,” Robinson said, “felt, ‘If I were the only white player trying to break into a black league, I’d want somebody to be my friend.’ And he said, ‘If Jackie Robinson has the ability and he can make it, that’s all I’m going to ask.'”
Pee Wee Reese treating Jackie Robinson the way he would treat any other teammate — and this, it should be said, is all the humble Reese ever said he was doing — survives through the years only because so few others were willing to do even that. Such a plain act resonated with Robinson for the rest of his life because it was so rare, even among his teammates, even after it became clear Robinson had changed the course of baseball history.
I wonder how we would explain it to an alien visiting our planet — why there are children’s books and movie clips and a statue commemorating the scene, immortalizing a teammate just putting his arm around the shoulder of another teammate during a baseball game.
“Why is this a big deal?” the alien might ask. “Is it so rare for humans to show such basic affection for one another? Is it a feat worthy of statues for humans to just stand up for one another, to comfort one another, to defend one another in difficult times?”
That answer, alas, is bigger than baseball. Meanwhile, we cling to small kindnesses and the genuine hope that there are enough good people in the world.
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(Photo: Bettman / Getty Images)
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