Reese Kaplan -- Head Down to See a Long Overdue Baseball Museum

Perhaps Hank Aaron said it best regarding the man who broke baseball's color barrier, "Jackie's character was much more important than his batting average."

To most people, all they know about Jackie Robinson are peripheral aspects of his advancement to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and becoming the first African American ballplayer to sit and play alongside the heretofore nearly exclusively white game of American baseball. All of those aspects of his playing career are indeed important including his struggles with teammates, opposition, umpires and fans who were not ready to accept him as an equal. 

The other side of the story, however, is one most people don't know about Robinson. During this year that just ended after more than 14 years of planning, collection and construction the Jackie Robinson Museum opened downtown on Varick Street and it opens your eyes to what the man meant during and after his career about civil rights issues that extended far beyond the diamond.

Long before I came to Mack's Mets and also prior to my departure to live where I do now in Southeast Asia, I belonged to an intrepid group of Mets fans who would email each other to death about the goings on at Shea Stadium, attend games together, go to lunches or dinners or drinks together where a bunch of grown up adult men and women would act more like children, vociferously, emotionally and often irrationally defending what the Mets as a team did and why they were theoretically better than all others. 

Don't get me wrong. I cherish every moment I spent with these folks and we felt that lifelong connection to belonging to a coterie of rabid and blinders-on fans for whom the 2-3 hours spent watching a ballgame blotted out whatever else was going wrong in the real world outside of baseball.

One member of the group recently introduced me to his visit to the Jackie Robinson Museum which is located not far from where he lives. He spoke eloquently about what it meant to him seeing the many exhibits and how it was about a lot more than hitting and fielding.

According to "Doctor Marc" as we know him in the group, "It is a treasure trove of memorabilia pertaining to both baseball and civil rights history. I was always confused about Robinson's relationship to the Civil Rights movement because I had the impression that he was a Nixon supporter. The reason for my misunderstanding of Robinson's position here is made clear within the museum's material."

Now of course the museum made a major effort to gather all of the baseball history of Jackie Robinson's career as well as news stories and archival footage of interviews as well as the catcalling Robinson experienced on his way up the ladder. 

It didn't get any easier when he got to Brooklyn but he had the strength of his core beliefs not to fight back with fists but with his level of play which made him appear far more civilized and rational than the others who would ostracize him.

Dr. Marc also said, "Given the magic of digital data storage and presentation, the museum offers an extensive collection of contemporary newspaper articles documenting some of the horrific events of the Jim Crow era. The museum made it clear that I should admire Robinson as a ferocious and effective civil rights activist, not merely a pioneer in the baseball world."

The other interesting aspect of Doctor Marc's email to the group was the museum's section depicting the friendship between Robinson and pitcher Ralph Branca. Robinson initially did not have many people offering him respect, let alone friendship. Branca's demeanor was a major contributor in Robinson developing the wherewithal to persevere.

On a side note, Doctor Marc related an anecdote about his own family's experience with the pitcher, "Branca was a neighbor and lifelong friend of my cousin Lester who adored Branca and often played catch with him in their backyards. Imagine that. Playing catch with the pitcher who threw the pitch in the Polo Grounds (1951) that ended in the LF stands as Bobby Thompson's home run heard around the world."

While I'm now about a full 24 hours' travel on multiple vehicles and planes to make it to Manhattan to see this overdue and important new museum, take advantage of being a lot closer and head down to that corner of Canal Street to see number 42's life and legacy while you await the warmer weather and the start of Spring Training. (Be prepared to spend $18 for admission.)