You think Barack Obama is in the White House in 2011 if Jack Roosevelt Robinson wasn't in the Brooklyn clubhouse in 1947? Just asking.
Funny thing about the annual celebration of Robinson, and what he meant to the history of the game, to the history of America . . . the people who made it possible usually get short shrift. Not this year.
Jimmy Breslin has written a taut, little book titled "Branch Rickey," about the man who defied the other 15 club owners to sign Robinson. Happy Chandler, who was baseball's commissioner back then, gets credit for ignoring that 15-1 vote by the owners to squelch integrating the game. Leo Durocher, who managed Robinson, is cited for muffling a player mutiny.
Breslin is a New York character who has made a lovely living writing about New York characters. He fancies himself as a Damon Runyon kind of guy. I have read Damon Runyon, and Breslin is no Damon Runyon. But he did win a Pulitzer in 1986, and you've gotta respect that, even if he only spoke to Rickey once, and that was as a smart-aleck kid, sitting in front of the man at a football game.
It's a skinny book, 147 pages, and it would have been skinnier if he hadn't padded it with moth-nibbled anecdotes about a daffy pitcher named Billy Loes, who once claimed he lost a ground ball in the sun.
The book breaks no new ground. It's just a swift, entertaining read, littered with one-liners. ("Baseball was a sport for hillbillies with great eyesight.")
"Branch Rickey was neither a savior nor a samaritan," Breslin writes. "He was a baseball man, and nowhere in his religious training did he take a vow of poverty."
