Yankees honor Jackie Robinson
Posted by: Peter Abraham - Posted in Misc on Apr 18, 2007 
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The Yankees on Tuesday night dedicated a plaque in Monument Park to Jackie Robinson. The only other non-team personnel so honored are Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II and the victims of Sept. 11.
The text of the plaque reads:
“In becoming the first Major League player to break the color barrier, Jackie will forever be an inspiration with his grace, dignity and perseverance. His story and the stories of those who never had the same opportunity must never be forgotten.”
The team also donated $1 million to The Jackie Robinson Foundation.
We watch baseball games – hopefully – with no regard for the color of a player’s skin. It’s embarrassing to think that only 60 years ago that wasn’t the case. Sports should be one place where it should only matter whether you can play, not who you are. Hopefully the example Jackie Robinson set will eventually weave its way through the rest of society as it did baseball.
Great post Pete. I totally agree. If anyone from another team deserves a plaque in monument park it is Mr. Robinson. The only other person I wouldn’t have a problem with would be Roberto Clemente for what he did on and off the field. Other than that, no one else.
It’s stories like these that make you proud to be a Yankee fan. Well said Pete.
“Sports should be one place where it should only matter whether you can play, not who you are.”
Unless you’re a chick, then you can only play if you have your own league.
Thanks for the update, Pete. What a wonderful gesture by the team.
nice to see that
side note: Mike Myers: 7 IP, 1 H, 0.00 ERA
ChrisV82: I’m fairly sure that if a woman could help a team, somebody would sign her. Baseball teams have signed all races, nationalities and even guys with one arm or six fingers or legally blind. If a woman could throw 95 and hit the corners, she’s have a contract in a second.
great post, pete.
you’ve gotta feel good for chase wright. good to see the kid pick up his first big league win. hopefully it’s something he can build on.
a-rod is unreal. absolutely unreal.
i missed the game, as i was treated to jeff weaver: live and in person. just awful.
I’m not sure I agree with the idea that a woman would be welcomed into the MLB if she could play. There’s no female baseball player out there who is better than, say, Tony Womack? Haha. I guess the idea of the ceiling for female baseball players being lower than the floor for male players just doesn’t compute.
LOL @ Jeff Weaver. There is no woman who could pitch better than Jeff Weaver? I’m pretty sure at this point *I* could pitch better than Jeff Weaver.
BTW, pick up Jackie Robinson’s autobiography “I Never had It Made” if you get the chance. It’s a great read and it gives you more insight into what he endured breaking into the majors and even after he established himself as a star player. I have nothing but admiration for the man and his family.
Right on! Pete.
Jenny Finch is certainly one of — if not the best — female baseball/softball player in America right now but she’d get mauled in the big leagues.
If Kei Igawa is going to have a hard time getting hitters out in the big leagues, how do you think someone like Finch would do against major league hitters?
Not to mention that she throws underhand on top of it.
Anyone who can get ML hitters out will find themselves on a big league roster if they have that kind of ability.
One can only imagine the enormous media circus that would ensue.
yanks do it with class once again
ARod ought to take a good look at Jeff Weaver. Why? They share the same agent, Scott Boras.
Boras pushed Weaver out of the most comfortable situation he has ever been in throughout his career (St. Lousi and Dave Duncan), a place that treated him great as a (hard for me to say this) World Series hero, for a few extras bucks in Seattle.
The result? He is “Jeff Weaver” again. Awful pitching and last night, he was booed off the field by Mariners fans. A pretty tough feat since Mariners fans usually save their booing for former Mariners players when they return to Seattle.
With ARod FINALLY becoming comfortable with himself and New York (the results are on display every night), he should really think twice about leaving right now.
Yes, he will make a lot more money. But, it may not be as easy to change teams again as he (or Boras) may think. Even if he lands in a “safe” place like Anaheim.
Well — Johnny Damon throws like a girl. Does that count?
Also, how excited do you think Chase Wright and his family are regarding his start and the Daily News back page? If I was related to him I would definitely go out and buy like a hundred copies!
Finally — Weren’t the Yankees very late to the integration party also? From what I can see, it didn’t happen until 1955 with Elston Howard. You can’t really hold today’s personell responsible for the transgressions of past GMs and owners, but it always makes me sad to think that while the Dodgers and some other teams were hiring African American players, the Yankees remained an all-white team for so many years.
The Yanks had a poor record on integration. I think Casey had something to do with this.
Actually, the AL as a whole was collectively pretty slow to the table in regards to integration.
It was a nice night and the salute to Jackie was great. The video they played at the Stadium was very moving.
It was George Weiss, the GM throughout the Stengel era, that deserves most of the blame for resisting integration.
In this politically correct world it can sometimes be very dangerous to point out the obvious, but men and women ARE physically VERY different. The percentage of women with the ability to compete against men in sports that require significant physical exertion is probably incredibly small. The likelihood that those women would ever wind up playing baseball is probably even smaller.
Also, while Tony Womack is awful by MLB standards, he is still one of the best baseball players in the world (just about every professional baseball players is). As Pete mentioned, if that very rare female athlete with the physical ability to blow people away emerged, someone would give her chance.
As for Jennie Finch, she throws underhand and from 40 feet. Underhand fastballs in the 60-70MPH range (men windmill pitchers can hit well over 100) are very hard to hit from that close, but that means nothing in the context of overhand at 60’6″.
Boston Fan Disguised as a Yankee Fan in Boston Marathon
http://www.boston.com/sports/s.....nx_cheers/
This just caught my eye and I had to laugh. I wonder how often a Boston fan gets pelted with insults in the city while wearing Red Sox gear; if I had to guess, Yankee fans are a far more forgiving and accepting crew. What struck me and made me shake my head was the final line, “Boston again? Maybe, but never again in the colors of the dark side.” – I thought perhaps this schmo will stop referring to the Yankees as “the dark side” now that he’s taken so much verbal abuse. Apparently not.
Yankee fans are more “forgiving” becuase unlike Boston we win something on average every 4 or 5 years. Long story short: They are the Red headed step-child of this relationship, historically speaking.
No, David The Redsox are last team in baseball to integrate and accept blacks.
Pete – I liked the article that you posted 2 posts ago: “the rotation is in tatters.” Good quote by Proctor, gotta love it.
Yeah, the Yankees were pretty late to integrate but the Red Sox were the last team to integrate, and I beleive they did it in 1959, 4 years later than New York.
New York may have had less pressure to integrate since the Brooklyn Dodgers were all over it. They had Vic Power early on as a prospect but didn’t want to bring him up because he was too “wild”. By that days standard living wild meant that he dated white women.
One of my favorite Vic Power stories was when he was in Spring Training in segregated Florida, he tried to go into a restaurant. The waitor told him that they don’t serve colored people there. Vic responded with “That’s okay, I don’t eat colored people. I just want some rice and beans.”
as a kid,when i practiced my mickey mantle drag bunts,i did it with my jackie robinson bat that had a big tapered handle that got bigger and bigger as it got to the end of the handle. you had no choice but to choke up. whenever i would get in a slump in the every day all day long games we had up in the field, i’d go with my jackie robinson bat that made you choke up. it slowed down your swing and helped you make contact. nellie fox had a similar bat, but it didn’t have the style that the jackie robinson bat had, so my jackie robinson bat was my go to bat. i learned lessons about hitting with that bat that stuck to this day. did i ever think about color as a 10 year old? i don’t think so. i associated jackie robinson with slowing down and getting it right and making contact. jackie robinson is still sending out messages by the way he played and who he was.
it’s fitting for me that jackie robinson has a plaque in monument park along with mickey and the rest of the yankees. really good move on the yankees part.
my only disappointment is that the media didn’t really cover it.
this is the new york times coverage today,” … Before the game, the Yankees dedicated a memorial in Monument Park to Jackie Robinson, the former Brooklyn Dodgers star. The Yankees also painted Robinson’s No. 42 along the baselines.”
huh? that was less than my description of jacki robinson’s bat.
if baseball is going to continue to spread the lessons of jackie robinson , then the media, new york times, and other newspapers have to do a better job than their effort today.
Did some moron at the Post really think it was necessary to put a GIANT picture of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby and her father on the front page as bigger news than the “Pscyho” underneath it about the VT maniac? There is something seriously wrong with this society to have that soap opera garbage on the front page at all, let alone right now. Who with any intelligence really cares even a little bit to see pictures of that guy with his baby? Not that I’m so ignorant to think the Post is actually a credible “News”-paper, but come on!
“http://www.boston.com/sports/specials/marathon/articles/2007/04/17/faux_yankee_gets_earful_of_bronx_cheers/”
everytime i read something like this it amazes me. it also amazed me the number of sox fans i would see on a daily basis when i lived in manhattan for 2 years, and they didn’t seem to bother anyone. now i’m upstate and think there’s a lot more yankee fans percentagewise than anything else. way more than when i was back in the city…
What’s funny is when I’m in Boston every week (Cambridge, really, maybe that makes a difference, I guess), I go to the gym with my Yankee hat on and sometimes my Yankee fleece… Now I’m not small, but I’m not jacked or anything either, and I have never heard a word from any sox fan other than joking around with people at work.
Ironically, the last thing to come up in a remembrance of Robinson is that he was an amazingly good baseball player, with a career line of .311/.409/.474, and an MVP 1949 in which he went .342/.432/.548 with 124 RBIs. He would have been a hero even if he had been a below-average 2B, but to put up numbers like that while battling pressure, heckling, and threats that no player today can even dream of – that’s truly inspiring.
But what am I saying – Robinson should have been booed because he was a choker in the playoffs (career .234 hitter for a Dodger team that went 1-5 in the World Series). What a loser! (Just a little ARod choker humor – please don’t ban me.)
the colors of the darkside? Who is he kidding? Does he not remember how much the Red sux have spent in free agency this off season? Of course, we are somehow still the evil empire but Bostonians are the biggest hipocrits I have ever met. And its true red sux fans are soooo much more obnoxious as people and there is sooo much more hatred towards the yanks in boston than a yankee fan would ever be to a redsux fan in NY (I lived in Boston for four yrs in college but NY the rest of my life.)
We all know and heard that Jackie Robinson had a very time (to say the least) difficult in the Majors but I feel quite confident saying so did Elston Howard had a very difficult when he joined the Yankees. Isn’t it time for him to take his place in Monument Park. His number need not need to be retired because it already is…?
I’m more interested at this point in whether a MLB team will have the guts anytime soon to make a woman a GM. I know, you’re thinking there aren’t enough candidates, other than, say, Kim Ng or Jean Afterman. But that’s because women right now don’t see that career path as available to them. If one woman can break through, others will believe they have a future in baseball, too.
Good Post. Proud to be a Yankee fan!!!