There are places you assume are there but don’t know for sure. A school, say, in the middle of a huge city where college banners hang from the auditorium rafters and beneath them 10-year-olds carry backpacks and aim toward the rest of their lives, only they don’t really know it for sure because that’s, like, way after lunch.
There are people in these places where every day is Jackie Robinson Day, where the lessons are in a taut “Good morning!” and a pal who looks nothing like you and a little girl in a hijab and a math teacher who sees the best in all of it.
Commonwealth Avenue Elementary School, say, which is a few miles from Dodger Stadium and a few in the other direction from the riots of a quarter-century ago, the ones these 10-year-olds’ parents hid from when they were 10.
On the corner of West 3rd and North Virgil avenues, on a Friday significant 69 years after Jackie Robinson himself laid a spike on the Ebbets Field grounds, some 200 fourth and fifth graders met Jackie’s daughter, Sharon. They met a black man, Carl Crawford, and a man of mixed-race parents, Trayce Thompson, who play for the Dodgers. They met a white woman, Leah O’Brien-Amico, who won three Olympic gold medals as a softball player.
Jackie Robinson, the man in the pictures they’d colored in Dodger blue and thumbtacked to the walls of the auditorium, had come to life in their visions of what is possible. Sharon Robinson, Carl Crawford, Trayce Thompson and Leah O’Brien-Amico were here in some part because of Jackie, and the children were here because they have next, and a big-headed Dodgers mascot was here because life at times can get creepy.
“Whatever it is,” O’Brien-Amico told them, “you go out there and find what you love to do and you can break down barriers just like Jackie Robinson.”
Outside, on a black-topped rectangle edged in chain link, they chanted, “One-two-three, play ball!” and then endeavored to hit plastic balls with plastic bats into a howling wind and over a 10-foot fence. Some did. They swung as hard as they laughed, as their playground teemed with big leaguers and friends and squirrely lime green baseballs. This was Major League Baseball’s Play Ball initiative, which hopes to clear a space – big or small – and put a bat and a ball into a kid’s hands and then see what comes. So they run the bases and play catch and watch LAPD officer Cortez shag balls in the outfield and beg Carl Crawford to – c’mon, how hard can it be? – throw a strike.
It was just so perfect, a world dressed in blue caps and white T-shirts, under a blue sky and a warm sun, the sounds of pattering sneakers chasing windblown doubles. The look of what Jackie might’ve left us, all smeared in colors and conviction and acceptance.
With what we’re leaving them – war, hate, global warming (science version), selfie sticks – they’d better learn to love each other. At the bare minimum, to get along. We could start by not hitting each other. Lacking that, maybe seeing ourselves in everyone else. And if we still want to hit each other after that, well, get a bat and a ball. Play Ball is giving them out for free.
“My father fought his entire life – and fights through all of us – to achieve equality in America,” Sharon Robinson said while standing on that black-topped playground. “Yes, he’s hopeful today.
“I think he’d feel disappointed we’ve continued to struggle to build our numbers in baseball. Yet we see more brown faces on the playing fields. My father is the kind of person who would want to remind us we still have a ways to go.”
Her father, Jackie, is, for her, in the present tense. Reminded of it, she smiled.
“He’s so much present in my life,” she said. “Yes, he’s always with me. … He does live with me every day. This is more of a shared experience.”
Just like on this playground, the Colorado Rockies and Chicago Cubs in the moment stood at Wrigley Field, we’d hope with their hearts filled with Jackie. Soon, big-league fields across the country would look the same, we’d hope proud in the number being worn and what it meant, and yet different in the paths that number took to reach those backs. The 42 in New York, in Cleveland, in Minneapolis, in St. Louis and in L.A. asks, “What are we doing to ourselves, folks? Who are we?”
It reasons, “Let’s be No. 42. Let’s be Jackie. Let’s be bigger than all the crap that’s out there, that hurts people, that sends our children into a place that can’t be real, that judges them before they’ve even introduced themselves, that eventually will soil the boys and girls at West 3rd and North Virgil unless we don’t let it.”
It looks over a random playground, over boys and girls waiting to see how the world will treat them, and it cautions, “How are we going to reach all these children?”
The 42 does not fret. The 42 holds out its arms. It insists Jackie Robinson Day is not a day at all, but a reminder of who we need to be on all of the days. The children? All of these wonderful children?
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