“Baseball’s Finest Moment”

(accessed from https://www.thinkbluela.com/2012/12/baseballs-finest-moment/ on May 23, 2020)

From https://herbert.blogs.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/baseballs-finest-moment-pee-wee-reese/:

In the spring of 1947 . . . [PeeWee] Reese [was] the [Brooklyn Dodgers’] shortstop . . . [He] had grown up in the Jim Crow atmosphere of Louisville, Ky., and had never so much as shaken hands with a black person . . .

. . . As is now well known, the abuse [Jackie Robinson] took as the first black player in the modern era of the major leagues was grotesque. Pitchers ignored the strike zone and threw directly at his head. Base runners tried to gouge him with their metal spikes. People spat at him, threw garbage at him, and shouted every disgusting epithet imaginable.

In his book, “The Boys of Summer,” [Roger] Kahn noted that the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon spent a day with the Dodgers in 1947 and concluded that “Robinson is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.”

One day, in Cincinnati, when the abuse had reached a fever pitch, Reese decided he had had enough. The Dodgers were on the field and the players in the Reds’ dugout were shouting obscenities at Robinson. Fans were booing and cursing Robinson, who was standing at first and trying, amid the chaos and the rising heat of his own anger, to concentrate on the game.

Reese called time. And in a gesture that is deservedly famous, he walked across the infield to Robinson, placed a hand on his shoulder in a very public display of friendship, and offered him a few words of encouragement.

“It gets my vote,” said Kahn, “as baseball’s finest moment.”