Phils hurled insults at the 'noble experiment'

The photo was taken, the two men looking pleasant enough, though they gripped a bat instead of each other's hands.

But Freddie Schmidt, a Phillies pitcher, told Eig that as the photographer snapped the picture, he heard Chapman say, "Jackie, you know you're a good ballplayer but you're still a nigger to me."

A mythology has grown up around those Phillies-Dodgers series. Some claim a black cat was set loose on the Shibe Park field. Others say fans here hurled watermelon chunks. If so, contemporary accounts ignored the incidents and Eig has never been able to confirm them.

Surely, other players and managers taunted Robinson, too. But perhaps the stories about the Phillies endured because the franchise was so slow in getting a black player of its own.

When the Phils won the pennant in 1950, beating Robinson's Dodgers on the final day, they became the last NL team to do so without one black or Latino starter.

It would be 1957 before they finally fielded a black player. By then, every team but the Tigers and Red Sox had integrated.

And while no one seemed to notice at the time, the details of infielder John Kennedy's Phillies debut proved ironic.

Kennedy's first game, as a late-inning pinch-runner for Solly Hemus, came on April 22, 1957, 10 years to the day after that infamous Phils-Dodgers meeting.

The Phillies' opponents were the Dodgers.

The location was Ebbets Field.