...on sportswriters who use the fact that games were rained out on Jackie Robinson Day in baseball as a metaphor for the state of the game?
That aside, I grew up as the child of two Brooklyn Dodger fans. My folks still had all of the old yearbooks and it was those that I snuck into my father's closet to read, not the mythical dirty magazines that every teenaged boy expects to find. I learned about Jackie Robinson, and Roy Campanella and Newk and Junior Gilliam and all the rest from those old, tattered yearbooks. I remember one picture of Gilliam, a switch-hitter, holding a bat with handles at both ends. Perfect for a switch-hitter, I suppose, but the image, and the notion of those Dodgers as being everyone's team - the team of the immigrants and the neighborhoods while the Yankees were the team of high-rises and Central Park West - has always stayed with me. And through the Dodgers, America - for Jews (like Cal Abrams), for African-Americans, for Italian-Americans (c.f. Al Gionfriddo), for Polish-Americans (God bless George "Shotgun" Shuba"), and for Everyone Else who wasn't a Yankee.
They lost that when they moved to LA, I think, and they never got it back. But I'm glad they had it in 1947. Thank you, Brooklyn Dodgers. Thank you, Jackie Robinson.
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