Several years ago, on a lost spring training morning, a former Brooklyn Dodgers relief pitcher named Joe Black told a story about Jackie Robinson. As players and Dodgers teammates they had been racial pioneers – Robinson the first African-American in the major leagues and Black the first black man to win a World Series game – but it was what they did on the mornings before the games that stayed with Black the most.
Whenever the Dodgers of the late 1940s and early 50s arrived in a city, he pulled out a phone book and searched the names of local schools. Then convinced Black or one of the team’s other African-American stars, like Roy Campanella or Don Newcombe, to come along as he showed up unannounced at a school and asked to meet the principal. The principals, stunned to see one of baseball’s most famous players at their door, quickly gathered their students for an assembly to listen to the great Robinson speak.
It is into this history that Dave Roberts walks. Sixty-eight years after the Dodgers broke the color barrier, they finally hired their first minority manager on Monday. In an era where baseball clubhouses are often more black, Latino and Asian than white the franchise of Robinson is putting a man with a black father and Japanese mother in charge of the team. This is not an insignificant thing.
Roberts’ hiring comes at a time when baseball is confronting a series of new racial crises. Young African-Americans are turning away from the sport, chased off by the costs of playing youth ball and no longer identifying with the game Robinson changed. One of the reasons they have struggled to relate is that few of the managers look like them or can understand their experience. Lately, a concern has rippled through baseball that all the Ivy League-educated general managers with business pedigrees are seeking managers who are like them, all but eliminating blacks and Latinos from those jobs. Even the Nationals recent hiring of Dusty Baker was seen as an anomaly – a backup after the Nats owners were cheap with their first choice, Bud Black.
The Dodgers, in fact, seemed destined to hire Gabe Kapler, a man their Tulane-educated president Andrew Friedman knew well from when Friedman was Tampa Bay’s general manager. But reports say the team’s ownership asked him to expand his search. In doing so, Friedman and his general manger, Farhan – the first Muslim to hold such a job in US pro sports – were reportedly blown away by Roberts who had always been seen as a thoughtful, enthusiastic and respected player on his teams.
Now the team of Jackie Robinson has broken another invisible barrier by showing that the minority coaches can have a future as managers in the advanced-analysis world of baseball. And while this isn’t as significant as the team’s signing of Robinson in 1947 or even Cleveland’s naming of Frank Robinson as manager in 1975, it is a very important step in the modern game. While Jackie and Frank Robinson broke through overt racism, Roberts is cracking through something more-subtle but just as dangerous. He is changing the unspoken and ridiculous perception that black players and coaches somehow can’t relate to a culture where decisions are made as much on data as they are on gut feelings about players.
There is no way Friedman would hire Roberts simply because he is black or because ownership ordered it. Other teams had been trying to pry Friedman away from the Rays for years. He would not have gone to the Dodgers last year without full power to choose a manager he wanted. He had to believe Roberts embraced all the same ways of looking at the game as Kapler. Friedman had to be comfortable. And that’s what makes the Roberts move so important: as one of the kings of the sabermetric movement in front offices Friedman is telling the other white baseball executives with elite educations they shouldn’t quietly assume their best candidate is someone who looks like them.
Roberts should have a great chance to succeed on the team where he once played for two and a half seasons. The Dodgers have a robust farm system, they are spending heavily in Cuba and can afford to sign almost any free agent they want. He will have the kind of roster that can make the playoffs almost every year. He is going to win in Los Angeles. As he wins, other teams will expand their manager search pools too. Maybe they will see their organizational masterminds don’t need to be white and from expensive colleges. Perhaps they can find the same kind of thinking in their coaches’ locker rooms the way baseball always did before. Just when it seemed as if opportunity was closing for blacks and other minorities in baseball, Roberts has opened a new door.
On that forgotten spring training day in Arizona when Black told the story of Robinson and the schools he said he and the other black players on the 1940s and 50s Dodgers wondered if owner Branch Rickey had made the right choice in Robinson. He wasn’t the most famous black player of the time, nor even the most personable. In fact Robinson was seen by them as something of an introvert.
“We thought about it and we realized Mr. Rickey picked the right guy,” Black said. “All the names we thought (were better) would have been able to take the abuse but they couldn’t perform on the field as an all-star the way Jackie did. When you’re tight with friction you can’t perform at the same level as when you are loose. Jackie was able to withstand the animosity and maintain a relaxed attitude.”
The hiring of Dave Roberts is not like the signing of Jackie Robinson. The barriers are different now. He isn’t breaking down walls, but he is cracking a ceiling that has emerged in recent years. He is challenging a different racism than Robinson took on. And that makes him just as much of a racial pioneer for a modern age.
