Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season

I am a born and raised Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodger fan. In fact my family moved from New York to Los Angeles the same year as the Dodgers. Before my brothers and I were born, my parents went to Ebbets field every weekend. I still have a box full of Brooklyn scorecards from those days. I was too young to see Jackie in his prime, but my Dad took me to some games in 1956 and I got to see Jackie and all the "Boys Of Summer"! I was a Brooklyn Dodger fanatic even at that age. Besides watching the Dodgers, I read everything available on them, and still do, 50 years later. I can unabashedly say I love Jackie Robinson. One of my many fond memories of my Dad, was him talking to me in front of our tiny black and white TV watching the Dodgers. He said "I have gone to hundreds of baseball games, and have seen 1,000 players, and the most exciting player I ever saw was Jackie Robinson!" "What Jackie did, was not displayed only in the statistics. Over the history of baseball, many players stole more bases. (Such as Ricky Henderson stealing bases with a 7 run lead in the 8th inning.) But no one unnerved every player on the team just by leading off the base and dancing on his pigeon toes, like Jackie. This book points out little, subtle, beneficial affects, on the whole Dodger team, that the average fan wouldn't see. The pitcher and catcher would be so nervous with Jackie dancing around on the base paths, that they would be afraid to throw curve balls, so the batters got better pitches to hit. Jackie stole home more times, than just about anyone except Ty Cobb. When we moved to Los Angeles there was a program on called the "Million Dollar Theatre", in which they showed the same movie on TV every day for a week. When the "Jackie Robinson Story" was on, I watched it every night, and literally memorized the dialogue. People forget that the Brooklyn Dodgers were the "original America's team". And that was because of Jackie. When Jackie broke the color line, he wasn't only fighting for the blacks, but he also was fighting for the Jews, and every minority that has been suppressed. When I watch old sports shows, when they talk about Jackie, I actually get tears in my eyes, because I know what he went through. I've read just about every meaningful book on Jackie and the Brooklyn Dodgers. I would rate this book as the 2nd best Jackie book of them all. (My personal favorite is "Great Time Coming".) This book was interesting to me as compared to many others, because it not only zoomed in on his first year as a player, but also went deeper into his personal life during that first year. All the way to the size of a little room he and Rachel rented, along with their infant son. If you were to ask me, what, with all my knowledge, I have on Jackie's playing, was the biggest thing I learned from this book, I would say his affect, and dominance, in every facet of the game, that didn't appear in his batting average, in a losing cause as a rookie in the 1947 World Series against

Before entering into Branch Rickey's radical experiment in integration, Jack Robinson was already a proven winner and fiery competitor. This is driven home in Eig's accounting of Robinson's youth in Pasadena, his athletic experiences at UCLA, and his wartime tour of duty as an Army officer whose beliefs were tested when he courageously made a stand against Jim Crow. Whereas many would not have believed Robinson a viable candidate to break baseball's race barrier, this book conveys the genuis of his selection and his immediate impact on the game and the nation. For the most part, we are all familiar with the Jackie Robinson story. What Eig does is take us through the infancy of this tenuous journey and provide us an inside look at the loneliness, isolation, and anxiety that Robinson had to endure in addition to the normal pressures of a rookie season in the Majors. An excellent work!

The story of Jackie Robinson has been told in several books by many distinguished authors. Now Jonathan Eig, author of the definitive book on Lou Gehrig, has given us a fresh look at the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947, which was Robinson's initial season with the team. First let me say this man (Eig) can write. This is not a rehash of other stories you may have read. The author skillfully weaves the role of influential individuals such as Branch Rickey, Pee Wee Reese, Harry "The Hat" Walker, Leo "The Lip" Durocher, Burt Shotten, Eddie "The Brat" Stanky, Dick Young of the New York Daily News, and others in this historic story. Baseball rosters were heavily made up of players from the south. The Dodgers were no exception, and they brought their long held prejudices along with them. You may think you have heard all the anecdotes relating to Robinson and the Dodgers, but the gifted author of this book will provide you with nuggets of information culled from a variety of sources. Years after the fact, several former Dodger players said Robinson "made them better men." However, the author notes, these claims were made only after supporting civil rights became fashionable. In 1947, when Robinson needed these friends, he found none on the Dodgers. At least significant ones! Reese developed a genuine friendship with Robinson, but in 1947 Pee Wee was one of the boys and whether the often told incident of him supporting Robinson in Cincinnati when he was being heckled is open to question. At least for 1947. This is quite simply one of the very best of hundreds of baseball books that I have read. It is definitely a keeper for anyone's library. It's a great story, especially with the 60th anniversary rapidly approaching. I can't wait to see what this new author, Jonathan Eig, is preparing for us to read next.

Once again, another Grand Slam from Jonathan Eig. I never thought there would be a book on sports better than Eig's previous book, Luckiest Man, but Opening Day is. I'm not a sports fan at all, so it is even more remarkable that I loved both books. The reason that I did is that they both far transcended sports. Both are about universal struggles. The first was about the very personal struggle of Lou Gehrig to come to grips with an unfathomable disease that slowly but surely stripped him of his strength and life. The new book, Opening Day, is about the very public struggle of one man, Jackie Robinson, to integrate baseball. Eig could have used flowery language and soaring rhetoric to tell this story, as so many before him have done. Ironically, it is precisely because Eig used stripped down, economical language and let the facts and actual, contemporaneous quotes speak for themselves that the book is so powerful. Eig has mastered the first rule of writing: "show, don't tell." The book is thus a matter-of-fact masterpiece. Because it is so understated, you may not realize what a tour-de-force it is until you are done reading and figure out that it knocked you for an emotional loop. The book is masterful in describing the odd way in which Robinson was merely another worker trying hard to succeed after getting a big promotion (in this case from the minor leagues to the majors), at the same time he - and the world - knew he was making history. That resulted in an odd paradox - while much of America was wishing with all their might for Robinson to be a "credit" to his race (to put it in the patronizing parlance of the time) , and some bigots were hoping that Robinson would prove them right by disgracing his race -- Eig shows that Robinson thought that the outcome of that grand debate hinged more on whether he got base hits or not than whether the nation was emotionally ready to accept black people as equals. Opening Day is also full of understated, dry humor, which the reader has to be on his or her toes to always pick up on. But such attention by the reader is well worth the effort. Unlike so many other sport stories, which tell the story only from the perspective of the players, Opening Day is pitch-perfect in also telling the story from the perspectives of the fans in the stands, listening on the radio, or watching on new-fangled TVs at bars. More than that, it tells the story from the perspective of both the insanely-devoted Brooklyn fans and average Americans. Perhaps the book's greatest achievement is how well it explains just how much Jackie Robinson meant to Black America. It reminded me that Robinson's feat came almost a decade before Brown versus Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Eig convincingly explains how revolutionary it was for Black people to have one of their men be able simply to slide into the leg of a white man in public - in the most famous national game, no less - and not only not be lynched, but be hai

I just finished Jonathan Eig's book "Opening Day", and loved it. Like his earlier work "Luckiest Man", Eig sticks to facts and historical sources (interviews [old and new], newspaper sources) and is able to separate some of the myths surrounding Jackie Robinson and the 1947 season from the truth. For example, the story about Pee Wee Reese draping his arm around Robinson's shoulder in Cincinnati in 1947. Great story, but not much fact supporting whether it happened. Eig reports the known sources and lets the reader decide whether to believe the facts or the myth (in this case, I like the myth!). This is the first book that I know of that chronicles the 1947 season (w/some "flashbacks", which are necessary to understand some of the people and the culture and thought of the time). Eig's writing style keeps the reader interested, as Robinson joins the Dodgers after a year with the minor league Montreal Royals, proceeds to take the field and ultimately become Major League Rookie of the Year - there was only one for both leagues at the time. Interviews with Rachel Robinson, Jackie's wife, show both the courage Robinson shows, as well as the emotional turmoil, as Robinson had promised Branch Rickey that he would not fight his tormentors. As the season progresses, Eig does a great job of how Robinson's Dodger teammates loosen up to him, believing that his playing as a ballplayer is more important than skin color. By the end of the season, Ralph Branca is catching Robinson who is diving for a foul ball, something that might not have happened earlier in the year. There's a great scene where Dixie Walker, possibly unfairly maligned as an instigator of a potential major league strike against Robinson, calls Robinson aside to give him batting tips. Rachel Robinson is even invited to hang with the other players' wives. All in all, an awesome book. The cliches are true, as this is a book about courage and facing adversity, but it is also a plain old good baseball book, chronicling a very important moment and year in history, not just baseball history. I heartily recommend this book, as well as Eig's first book "Luckiest Man".