A Change of the Heart

When Bobby Bragan was young, people used to call him “Nig” because he was of a darker complexion than most. He liked the nickname. He thought it funny. Bragan grew up in Alabama. The only black people he knew served food and worked for his father’s construction company. He did not even consider that his nickname might be offensive to anyone until he reached the Major Leagues, and a teammate told him.

Bragan began his big-league career as a shortstop. He wasn’t much of a hitter, and he wasn’t much of a shortstop either, an unproductive combination. In 1940, as a rookie, he made 49 errors. A year later, he made 45 more. He realized soon after that becoming a backup catcher offered a more secure future.

He was traded to Brooklyn in 1943. In 1945, he went to war. After he was discharged from the Navy, he traveled directly to Havana and Dodgers spring training. He didn’t want to wait a minute longer to get back into the game. The Dodgers’ skipper Leo Durocher was thrilled. Brooklyn had finished a close second to the Cardinals for the pennant in ‘46, and Durocher had become convinced that Bragan’s steady hand would have made the difference. Others in the club agreed.

“There were not many catchers better in the majors who were better than Bobby,” Brooklyn’s Dixie Walker said. Bragan and Walker were fast friends.

This was the spring of 1947.

This was the spring of Jackie Robinson.

Dixie Walker was the most beloved player in Brooklyn. He was the team’s star — he won the batting title in ‘44, the RBI crown in 45, and he finished second in the MVP balloting to Stan Musial in ‘46 — and his hard-fought Southern charm and delighted the people of Brooklyn. They called him, in perfect Brooklynese, “The People’s Cherce.”

Much has been written and said over the years about the days leading up to 1947’s Opening Day … and specifically Dixie Walker’s role in it. What we know for sure is that Walker did not want to play with a Black man. In later years, he would say he had no personal issue with Robinson or African Americans in baseball, but he owned a hardware store in Birmingham and felt sure that simply playing with Robinson would destroy his business. He decided to stop the Dodgers from playing Jackie Robinson.

His plan was to gather a few players on the team — some said he circulated a petition, others said he went from player to player — and start a player revolt. He had no trouble finding allies. Kirby Higbe was a hard-throwing and hard-living hell-raiser from South Carolina and the grandson of a Confederate soldier. When asked by Bill Stern how he developed his fiery fastball — a fastball often compared in his day to that of Bob Feller — he said, “Throwing rocks at Negroes.”

“He cut me off the mike right away,” Higbe wrote in his book The High Hard One. “I don’t think he understood. We were Southern boys, brought up to believe in separation of the races.”

Hugh Casey was a hard-drinking relief pitcher from Atlanta; he, too, had grown up throwing rocks, but he tended to fire them at whiskey bottles. Carl Furillo was a self-proclaimed hard hat from Pennsylvania whose rough view of the world left little room for empathy. Walker approached others, including Kentucky-born shortstop Pee Wee Reese.

And then there was Bobby Bragan, the backup catcher who had just come out of the Navy.

Walker’s ploy was for all of them to demand a trade if the Dodgers went through with the plan to play Jackson Robinson. As recounted in Jonathan Eig’s “Opening Day,” Walker began the protest with a note directly to Branch Rickey.

Dear Mr. Rickey,

Recently, the thought has occured (cq) to me that a change of Ball clubs would benefit both the Brooklyn baseball club and myself … For reasons I don’t care to go into I feel my decision is best for all concerned.”

Very sincerely yours,

Dixie Walker

Walker seemed to believe that his popularity, along with the support of numerous teammates — a group he expected to swell as the reality of the moment sunk in — would force Rickey and Durocher to give in. It was a spectacular miscalculation of the moment, something he probably realized when a red-faced Durocher addressed the team:

“I don’t care if a guy is yellow or black,” Durocher shouted, “or if he has stripes like a (bleepin’) zebra,” he yelled. “I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays.”

Rickey then stepped in to put down the rebellion. He summoned each of the potential traitors into his hotel room. Rickey had a different tack for each.

At Furillo, he shouted: “How could you possibly be against a man trying to make something of himself when you have seen the way people treated your father when he came from Italy?” (Furillo reportedly broke down and apologized and promised he would give Robinson a chance).

Rickey found Higbe to be much less open and promised to deal him as soon as convenient. The convenient moment came just two weeks into the season when Rickey banished Higbe to Pittsburgh in a swap for outfielder Al Gionfriddo.

Rickey tried trading Dixie Walker, too, but when the Pirates refused to include Ralph Kiner in the deal, Rickey changed his mind. Branch Rickey was, above all else, a shrewd executive interested in winning baseball games, and Walker was the Dodgers’ best hitter and an all-star. Rickey decided to gamble that when Walker saw just how good a ballplayer Jackie Robinson was — and came to understand that he gave the Dodgers a real chance of winning Brooklyn’s first-ever World Series — that the two strong-willed men would develop an uneasy peace. So it would go. Rickey would trade Walker to Pittsburgh after the season.

Then there was Bobby Bragan. There was no misidentifying Bragan’s views: He believed wholeheartedly that African Americans were inferior and had no business playing with white players in the major leagues. He was mortified at the thought of telling his family and friends back home that he was playing ball with Robinson. Bragan did not see his stance as hateful or even objectionable. This was simply his view of the world. He told Rickey that he would rather give up his career than play with Jackie Robinson.

It would have been nothing at all for Rickey to send Bragan packing to Pittsburgh. Despite Durocher’s and Walker’s sunny scouting report, Bragan was hardly a pivotal part of the Dodgers’ team. He was a backup catcher only good for a few dozen at-bats.

But Branch Rickey saw something in Bobby Bragan that Bragan did not even see in himself.

“If Jackie Robinson can play the position better than another player,” Rickey said, “then regardless of the color of his skin Jackie Robinson is going to play. You understand that Bobby?”

“Yes, sir,” Bragan said.

“And how do you feel about this?”

“If it’s all the same with you, Mr. Rickey, I’d like to be traded to another team,” Bragan said.

Rickey leaned back and asked Bobby Bragan a question: “If we call Jackie Robinson up, will you change the way you play for me?”

Here, at last, Bobby Bragan was forced to confront what kind of man he was.

“No sir,” Bragan said. “I’d still play my best.”

Rickey nodded. He had made his decision. Rickey would not trade Bobby Bragan.

Bragan began the 1947 season filled with bitterness. As he had expected, the people he knew back home were furious at him for playing on the same team as Jackie Robinson. He considered giving up the game; but he just loved baseball too much to quit.

And, from a distance, he began to take the measure of Jackie Robinson. He could play ball, no question about that — Bragan saw from the first day that Robinson was the best player on the field. He watched as the Dodgers pitchers — Rex Barney, Clem Labine, Casey — threw repeatedly at Robinson, knocking him to ground, sending him spinning, and how Robinson dusted himself off and stepped back in the box fiercely and wordlessly.

“He took it all,” Bragan would say with wonder.

Bragan saw all of that, and found himself slowly, very slowly, building a grudging respect for Robinson.

”I learned,” he would say. “Not fast. But I learned.”

In time, that respect turned into a sort of fascination. What made this man tick? How did he feel about all the fury that pointed at him? On the team train rides, Bragan began moving closer and closer to Robinson. Now he was two rows away. Now he was one row away. Now, he was sitting next to Jackie Robinson.

They didn’t talk much, not at first, and they didn’t talk about anything in particular. Maybe they would talk about the best way to hit against Warren Spahn. Maybe they would talk about the sidearmer Ewell Blackwell and how his blazing fastball would go every which way. Maybe Bragan told a little joke. Maybe Robinson broke a small smile. Maybe they played a little cards together; few things connect people the way a deck of cards can.

There was no movie moment, no crescendo with sweeping music. These were just two ballplayers sitting next to each other on a train. And then they were sitting next to each other in the dugout.

And when the folks back home in Alabama would rail about Robinson and baseball and the world going to hell, Bragan found, much to his surprise, dissent welling inside him. “Wait a minute,” he would think, despite himself. “You don’t know him.”

The Dodgers in 1947 were superb, Dixie Walker hit .300 again, Eddie Stanky walked 100 times, and the group that soon would later be called the Boys of Summer — Robinson, Reese, Furillo, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider — started to come together. The Dodgers won the pennant. They lost the World Series to the Yankees in seven, but Bragan delivered a big double in Game 6. Robinson was named Rookie of the Year; years later, the award itself would be named for him.

“And when it came time to pick up the $4,100 World Series money,” Bragan said, “nobody offered to give it back.”

Bragan’s days as a ballplayer were just about done — he would play in only nine games in 1948 — but his life in baseball was only beginning. He went to Fort Worth, where he served as a player-manager, then to Hollywood for a couple of years. In 1955, he was hired to manage the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was hired by the Pirates GM, a man named Branch Rickey.

Later, Bragan managed in Cleveland briefly and in Milwaukee for three years. He was not especially successful or unsuccessful — he finished his big league career with a record just a shade under .500 — but he had some interesting ideas.

Over the years, Bobby Bragan and Jackie Robinson became friends, real friends, the sort of friends who go to each other’s houses for dinner, who know each other’s wives and children, who embrace when they see each other.

In 1958, the year the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, Bragan was hired midseason to manage their Class AAA club in Spokane. That team featured a breathtakingly fast shortstop who had been in the minor leagues for eight trying years. That shortstop was angry, both at the world and at himself, and he seemed ready to quit. “I had just about given up on myself,” he would write. The shortstop was Maury Wills.

Bragan asked Robinson how he should handle Wills. “Talk to him,” Robinson said. And so he talked to Wills. “You have gifts,” Bragan told him. “You belong in this game.” Bragan convinced Wills to become a switch hitter, something they worked on every day. Meanwhile, Bragan would routinely call the home office and tell Dodgers brass: “You need a shortstop. I have your shortstop right here.”

The Dodgers called up Wills in 1959. He was their starting shortstop in the World Series. In 1962, he stole 104 bases, scored 130 runs, and won the MVP award. In all, he would lead the league in stolen bases six times, he would play in four World Series, and many believe he belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Maury Wills has credited much of his success in baseball and life to the friendship and mentorship of Bobby Bragan.

In 1964, Robinson wrote an underappreciated book called “Baseball Has Done It.” He asked his friend Bobby Bragan to write about his feelings.

“I was exposed to integration daily under the shower, in the next locker, on the bus, in the hotel and many conversations,” Bragan wrote. “All this adds up to a tolerant attitude, a little more understanding of the situation than if we’d never left Alabama.”

A year later, Branch Rickey died. Jackie Robinson and Bobby Bragan sat together in the same pew for the funeral.

Bragan spent a long life in the game of baseball; he died in 2010 at the age of 92. When a reporter asked him to name his greatest contribution to baseball, he could have talked about his World Series double. He could have talked about Maury Wills. He could have talked about his years as president of the Texas League, or the countless kids he motivated through the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation.

Instead, he said his greatest contribution to the game was getting out of it … and making room for the next generation.

“Roy Campanella,” he said proudly, “took my place.”

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