Bookshelf review: Beyond Home Plate

Jackie Robinson on Life After Baseball, edited by Michael G. Long. Syracuse University Press, 2013.

Some former athletes botch attempts to remain relevant after their playing days are over. They offer opinions that, while certainly their right to have and express, do little to offer insight (or interest) as to what kind of people they are. A few, like Jackie Robinson, make for notable exceptions.

When Robinson retired from the game, he was sought after by various sources to write about myriad topics, but most notably race relations in America. Long, an associate professor of religious studies and “peace and conflict studies” at Elizabethtown College and an author/editor of books on politics, religion, and civil rights, has collected some of Robinson’s writings — primarily from columnist stints with the New York Post, and, later, the New York Amsterdam News, one of the nation’s oldest African-American publications — for Beyond Home Plate, a slim volume that displays the depth of the man who broke baseball’s color line, 19th-century attempts notwithstanding.

While stories of Robinson’s writing “career” have appeared in any number of biographies and autobiographies that have appeared over the years, we get to see a certain style and temperament here that we may have missed from other sources as he argues passionately about opportunities (primarily the lack thereof) in baseball for men of color and his disappointment in the snail’s-pace progress of civil rights; the love for his family; and his appreciation for those who fight for equality, such as Branch Rickey, Martin Luther King Jr., and others.

It’s practically impossible to give someone a platform and not have some personal issues come to the fore, but that just proves that Robinson is as human as the rest of us, something that his detractors while he was playing would never to admit.

I found a couple of entries particularly eye-opening. For example, legend has it that Pee Wee Reese showed his support for Robinson in his rookie year by putting his arm around Robinson’s shoulder in a game against the Reds in Cincinnati, a city in the state neighboring his own Kentucky which made such a display by the southern-born shortstop even more noteworthy. But in a 1962 column for the Amsterdam News, Robinson states that the event took place in Boston. (That this gesture at all still seems to be a subject for debate).

I also “discovered” another book written by Robinson heretofore unknown to me: Wait Til Next Year, co-written with Carol Rowan and published by Random House in 1960.

Finally, thanks to the a new feature on the Sports Illustrated Vault website, I was able to read an article published in the March 21, 1960 issue by Robert Boyle on “The Private World of the Negro Ballplayer,” to which Robinson took great exception, and understandably so. You can see the article here, sans photos; however, if you use the Vault’s “View This Issue” function, you can read a digitized version of the original, which I feel greatly enhances the reading experience.

There comes a point at which there have been so many books written on an individual that you wonder, what can possibly be new? Beyond Home Plate shows there are still aspects of Robinson’s life worth exploring.