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April 15, 1997
Robinson, A Ballplayer Who Embraces His Predecessors
ON BASEBALL / By MURRAY CHASS
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EW YORK -- On a conference call for Tuesday night's celebration at Shea Stadium on the 50th anniversary of the integration of major league baseball, Don Newcombe was asked to compare the exploits of Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks.
Newcombe, a former teammate of Robinson's and a beneficiary of his heroic efforts, could have said Rosa Parks couldn't hit a curveball or couldn't steal home or couldn't make the pivot on the double play. But no, Newcombe last week said:
"Rosa Parks was a tired black lady. She just wouldn't get up and give her seat to a white man. What Jackie Robinson did had a worldwide impact. He was on the field every day, being threatened, being called names. To compare what Rosa Parks did to what Jackie Robinson did is unfair."
Len Coleman, the National League president, who has indefatigably spearheaded the Robinson celebration, quickly jumped in. Perhaps seeing the potential headlines screaming, "Newcombe Rips Rosa Parks" -- shades of Al Campanis 10 years ago -- Coleman pointed out that what Robinson and Parks did was different but equally important in the development of rights for people of color.
Newcombe, who followed Robinson by two years as the National League's rookie of the year, then in 1956 became the first player to win both the most valuable player and Cy Young awards, did not intend to belittle Rosa Parks's contribution to American society. He was simply raising Robinson to the level on which he believes his friend and benefactor belongs. He is not alone in that belief.
Delino DeShields was born a few years before Robinson died, but he has made it a personal project to learn about Robinson and blacks in baseball, and he has emerged with a strong feeling about Robinson's place in American history.
"Jackie was before Rosa Parks," the St. Louis Cardinals' second baseman said. "He was before Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Jackie did all this stuff. He's the pioneer, to me, for civil rights in general. Him breaking the color line in baseball was bigger than any civil rights march, anything, in my opinion, that happened after that. That was the transcending thing."
Robinson played in his first major league baseball game 50 years ago Tuesday, eight years before Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat on the bus. In terms of the general civil rights movement, he was well ahead of the times. Besides being a pioneering player, he was also an outspoken advocate of civil rights, speaking out to the white man's face as aggressively as he played on the white man's field.
DeShields, 28, is unusual as far as baseball players go. Many players, if not most, believe baseball began with them. They don't know Jackie Robinson, they don't know Curt Flood, they don't know Andy Messersmith. They'll certainly know Robinson when all of the celebrating is done, and they learned a little about Flood because of his recent premature death. Messersmith? Maybe someday.
But DeShields has made it his business to learn about the past. It is an honorable task he has assigned himself.
"I just wanted to find out as much as I could about current baseball and my history especially, not just baseball, but history in general," said DeShields, a Seaford, Del., native, who wears his baseball socks high in honor of Negro league players. "I like to read a lot. I think that's what you should do."
The least he can do, DeShields said, is to find out "where I came from."
"I have kids," he added, "so I want to pass it on to them. I'm not going to let them grow up not knowing stuff that I didn't know when I was kid. I'm going to make sure they know it early so they can apply it. Hopefully they can do something special in their lifetime."
A book about the Negro leagues, "Only the Ball Was White," spurred his interest in baseball history, DeShields explained. "After I read that," he said, "I just grabbed everything I could. I didn't know about blacks in baseball."
As much as he knows now about Robinson, DeShields also knows that later players like Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson and Bob Gibson and Flood endured their own travails.
"They were modern ballplayers, but they went through a lot of the same things," he said. "That's what keeps me going. If I have tough times in this game, I just think about these guys and what they had to endure. Nothing can happen to a ballplayer today, black or white, that can compare to what these guys went through."
Because baseball mirrors society, DeShields said, today's black players could use their status to create change.
"I think they can, but they're not, for whatever reasons," he said. "As a race, we can't keep pointing fingers at people and say what they haven't done for us. We have resources, everything to make changes ourself. I'm not saying that has to be the most controversial thing in the world, but you can't keep saying this guy's not doing this for me or they're not doing this for me when you're not doing things for yourself."
He might have learned that from Jackie Robinson.
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