Baseball’s Best Story now in theatres

Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson because it was good for business. The Dodgers’ business. Well, also because Rickey believed it was moral. But before Rickey could do anything, he needed the Dodgers’ Board of Directors to sign off on everything. And so the Board did, after Rickey convinced them that featuring a great black player (or players) would be good for business. That featuring a great black player would result in more wins and more fans in Ebbets Field.

And of course that’s exactly what happened.

There was something in 42 that rankled me.

Actually, there were a number of things in 42 that rankled me, but that’s because I know too much and anyway those things didn’t keep me from enjoying the movie quite a lot (see sidebar). One of those things came toward the end of the movie (and the 1947 season), when Dodgers radio man Red Barber says on the air that Jackie Robinson “has stolen 27 bases this season and yet to be thrown out attempting.”

There’s an odd little moment in 42 ... Jackie Robinson has just been added to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ active roster at the conclusion of spring training, and he walks into the Ebbets Field locker room for the first time. It seems an awkward moment for just about everybody, all the more so when the clubhouse boy directs Jackie to his “locker” ... a folding chair placed beneath a nail on the wall.

Jackie will get a real locker, the clubbie assures him, but right now this is the only thing that’s available.

With the unexpected and unqualified financial and critical successes of first Moneyball and now 42, it seems we’ve entered a Golden Age for baseball movies about things that actually happened. And thanks to the wonders of CGI, a filmmaker’s palate is now more expansive than ever when recreating old-time baseball. And there are reportedly more such movies coming, including films about the death of Ray Chapman and the famous Family Swap of ‘73 (although the latter seems to be on the back-burner, at best).

Still, I got to wondering which subjects might make for the best movies as the studios cast about for material to satisfy what seem to be the public’s rabid cravings for well-made baseball movies. And so I turned to some people who think about this stuff even more than I do ...

WARNING: You probably shouldn’t read the following unless you’ve already seen “42” or you’re waiting for Netflix or something. If you going to see it in the next week or two, I recommend holding off as there are probably some things here that you don’t want to know yet. But please come back!

As you’ve no doubt heard, 42 has been a big hit, both with moviegoers and (though somewhat less so) with critics.

Earlier this week I checked on Facebook, and 120 percent of my friends have seen the movie. What’s more, 110 percent of them agreed almost exactly with my take: 42 is flawed, as nearly every movie is, but tells a good tale as well as we might have reasonably hoped it would.

I don’t know about you, but when I see a movie that’s based on some actual historical event, I just can’t wait to get home afterward and consult Wikipedia to see what really happened. If the truth doesn’t quite match the movie ... well, let me give you an odd example.

One of my favorite movies last year was actually a documentary, Searching for Sugar Man. It’s about a Dylanesque singer-songwriter who made a couple of really good records in the early 1970s. Nobody cared much, though, and the artist, a Detroiter named Sixto Rodriguez, gave up the music business and just did a bunch of other things for a few decades. Unbeknownst to him, his records were huge hits in South Africa. Finally, some enterprising South African fans found Rodriguez, and brought him to the country for a series of triumphant concerts.

Wait a second ... 42 was released just last Friday and today is Jackie Robinson Day? That’s like the greatest coincidence in history, and in celebration I’ve compiled a fair number of 42-related links for your clicking pleasures ...

Then again, I’ve seen it just once and was taking notes. Maybe the second time I’ll become subversive, too.

Newsflash:

I’m presenting this as a news story, because it’s a news story. I don’t mean to editorialize. I do mean to point out that the No. 1 film in America, by quite a lot, features woolen baseball uniforms and digital recreations of Forbes Field and the Polo Grounds.

I kept waiting.

Last night I saw 42 the first chance I got, and I kept waiting to hate something. I’d resolved to avoid reading any reviews before I saw the movie, but my curiosity got the better of me and I read four or five of them earlier this week and they all said basically the same thing: Pretty good, but short on subtlety; earnest to a fault, if not downright hackneyed.*

Right-handed pitcher Carl Erskine first joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948, Jackie Robinson’s second season with the club. Erskine and Robinson were teammates through the 1956 season; during that span the Dodgers won five National League pennants and fell one game short in two other seasons on their way to becoming the legendary “Boys of Summer.” Last week, Erskine was gracious enough to answer, via e-mail, a few questions about Jackie Robinson and the new movie starring Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford.

Rob Neyer: Mr. Erskine, you debuted with the Dodgers just after the All-Star break in 1948, having been signed a couple of years earlier. Do you remember when you first met Jackie Robinson, and your impressions of him?

“Of course the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln made the southern Negro slave free,” Branch Rickey said in 1956, “but it never did make the white man morally free. He remained a slave to his inheritances. And some are, even today.” Rickey was being generous in his estimation of his fellow Americans in a way he never was with fellow baseball executives when negotiating a trade. It was more than “some” of his contemporaries who were still a slave to the prejudices they had inherited; it was many, as the sometimes violent confrontations over civil rights that were then occurring and would continue to occur over the next ten years, would demonstrate.

We tend to think of history in triumphalist terms: The country we live in today, with all its virtues and faults, was the one we were destined to have. Progress is the dominant force in the universe, giving us, year by year, a world a little less bleak than it was. Medievalism was so last year, every year; this year, next year, will be a new renaissance. In this view, the integration of baseball, planned by Rickey and carried out by Jackie Robinson, was the inevitable result of changes at work in the country and the world in the immediate postwar period. Integration was going to be tried and it was going to succeed.

With the big movie finally hitting the big screens later this week, CBS News’ Sunday Morning ran a story yesterday featuring interviews with Ralph Branca and Rachel Robinson, interspersed with clips from 42:

Obviously there’s not a great deal of depth in a hit-and-run piece like this, but seeing Mrs. Robinson and Mr. Branca never really gets old. By the way, later this week I’ll have an exclusive interview with another of Mr. Robinson’s teammates. Which I hope you enjoy half as much as I did.