Friday, April 16, 2004
MLB Celebrates Jackie Robinson Day
Yesterday was Major League Baseball's first annual "Jackie Robinson Day," to be held annually on April 15. Barry Bloom of MLB.com recounts Commissioner Selig's "emotional day" as he joined Rachel Robinson for commemorative ceremonies at Shea Stadium.
The Commissioner has often talked about traveling down from Milwaukee to Chicago in 1947 to see Robinson play. If the owners of the other 15 major league clubs had had their way, Bud never would have gotten the opportunity. One year before Robinson's major league debut, while he was already tearing up the International League, a committee consisting of four owners and the two league presidents were still making excuses why blacks couldn't or shouldn't play in the majors.
(A footnote: notorious Birmingham sheriff Eugene "Bull" Connor, best known for encouraging police dogs to attack civil rights demonstrators, first came to the community's notice as a minor league baseball announcer. The January 25, 1932 Sporting News profiled Connor, whose “homely but vivid accounts of games over Station WBRC have won him an army of followers." A much better army than the collection of human vermin he would lead a quarter-century later...)
|
Yesterday was Major League Baseball's first annual "Jackie Robinson Day," to be held annually on April 15. Barry Bloom of MLB.com recounts Commissioner Selig's "emotional day" as he joined Rachel Robinson for commemorative ceremonies at Shea Stadium.
The Commissioner has often talked about traveling down from Milwaukee to Chicago in 1947 to see Robinson play. If the owners of the other 15 major league clubs had had their way, Bud never would have gotten the opportunity. One year before Robinson's major league debut, while he was already tearing up the International League, a committee consisting of four owners and the two league presidents were still making excuses why blacks couldn't or shouldn't play in the majors.
(A footnote: notorious Birmingham sheriff Eugene "Bull" Connor, best known for encouraging police dogs to attack civil rights demonstrators, first came to the community's notice as a minor league baseball announcer. The January 25, 1932 Sporting News profiled Connor, whose “homely but vivid accounts of games over Station WBRC have won him an army of followers." A much better army than the collection of human vermin he would lead a quarter-century later...)
|
