The PBS "History Detectives" combed the city Sunday and Monday, unraveling a 64-year-old baseball mystery.
An ancient scorecard drew the public TV show that seeks to separate fact from folklore. The card indicated that Jackie Robinson, the man who would break baseball's color line in 1947, brought an integrated team of stars to Forbes Field to face some major leaguers -- before he played his first major-league game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
"Could this game have been a test to find out how America would react to integrated baseball?" the show asked in its press release.
Well, not exactly.
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The gifted Robinson did not emerge in Brooklyn by immaculate conception. He'd spent the '46 season with the Dodgers' top farm club in Montreal, and it was common for ballplayers, black and white, to barnstorm in the off-season for extra money.
That same October, Satchel Paige of the Negro Leagues and Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians, two of the greatest pitchers of all time, faced off with all-black and all-white teams, as they had for years.
There nonetheless was something special about this game in Pittsburgh, and so "History Detectives" host Tukufu Zuberi put a couple of sweaters under his windbreaker and hobbled, with a ruptured Achilles tendon, into a PNC Park seat to sit before a camera on a raw, rainy afternoon.
Baseball historian Tim Gay flew up from Washington to meet him. Author of "Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson," Mr. Gay immediately declared he'd never seen anything like that scorecard from Oct. 8, 1946.
Interracial teams had played since the game began. Paige was among several black stars paid big money to play for town teams in the Dakotas in the 1930s. But few artifacts like that official scorecard (with a Duquesne Pilsner ad, no less) survive, and this game "was the first time a racially integrated team played in a big-league ballpark," Mr. Gay said.
If that's so, the mainstream sports world was indifferent. The Pittsburgh Press focused on the World Series then under way between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals. Only a two-paragraph item toward the bottom of the lead page promised, "Robinson's Team Plays Here Today."
The 4 o'clock game pitted a team of major leaguers -- largely Pirates and Cincinnati Reds, second-division clubs -- against "Jackie Robinson's all-stars." The great Honus Wagner, then 72, managed the major leaguers, and a three-paragraph item at the bottom of the page the next day declared: "Robinson Stars As Team Wins."
About 3,000 watched as "Robinson cracked out a single, double and triple and fielded flawlessly at shortstop . . .The Negro star, who starred with Montreal and is the property of the Brooklyn Dodgers, drew praise from his major-league opponents on his fine play."
That was about it. Robinson's team won 6-4. There was a sense of novelty, not animosity. Yet it was an important stage for Robinson and his teammates, Mr. Gay said.
This '46 tour was a chance for Robinson to show his grit and initiative. Three of the black men who joined him-- Larry Doby, Monte Irvin and Roy Campanella -- would follow him across the color barrier to also have Hall of Fame careers.
The Feller-Paige showdown was still the bigger draw. Feller knew to spread money in advance with newspaper columnists, black and white. When his game was played in Pittsburgh nine days earlier it drew "a lot more than 3,000," Mr. Gay said.
It's pretty clear newspapers didn't know quite how to cover this integrated team. The Baltimore Afro-American ran an account of a game played later that month in Chicago this way:
... John Wright hurled five innings for the Robinson team, giving way to Ross Davis, who walked the first two men in the sixth, and Robinson flagged him to the dugout and sent Mike Nozinski, white, of the Nashua, N.H., New England team to the mound. He finished the game.
Later, the story mentioned that outfielder Marvin Rackley and shortstop Al Campanis, of the Montreal team, also played for Robinson and "both are white."
That story ran below one headlined, "Paige's All-Stars Again Beat Major Leaguers."
Integration didn't happen overnight, but a Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep in '46 and awakened in 1966 would have seen Pirates fans routinely cheering Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell. Sports has a way of leading democracy. As Mr. Zuberi put it, considering the U.S. in 1946 had just defeated the fascists in World War II, "We couldn't be the big racists if we just beat the big racists."
Not many seemed to care that autumn day in Pittsburgh when blacks and white ballplayers suited up together. Maybe that was progress right there.
This "History Detectives" episode is expected to air in August or September.
First Published: May 18, 2010, 8:00 a.m.
