My Thoughts on Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography
Aaron Sharp | February 26, 2021
If you read this blog regularly you know how my book reactions go. If not, here is the disclaimer.
Aaron’s Book Reaction Disclaimer: The premise is that one of my readers is asking me questions. For the record, this is just a device I am using to have fun. I’m the one asking and answering. It’s more interesting for me to write them this way, and it gives the other voices in my head a chance to talk.
Today the book I’ll be reacting to is Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography by Michael G. Long & Chris Lamb.
Why a book about Jackie Robinson?
Since childhood I have been fascinated by the Jackie Robinson story. What he endured, and the sheer weight of the hatred and animosity that was heaped on him, is all but indescribable to me. I don’t know how old I was, but I got a biography of Jackie Robinson when I was a kid, and from that moment I have just been awestruck that a human being could endure what he did, and could do it the way he did, and with the success he had.
Was Robinson really that good a baseball player?
Statistically (using WAR & JAWS) he has to be one of the 10-15 best second basemen in the history of baseball. The incredible part, and pardon the brief baseball geek out here, is that those 10 years were incredibly successful as a player.. The modern baseball world has statistics that really help us quantify how well someone plays, although we have more insight on the offense of older players than the defense. When you look at those stats (like wRC+) he was 35% better offensively that the average player of his time. Factor in the insane amount of pressure on him and opposition that he faced, and I think you have to imagine that had he been a white ballplayer who could just show up and play, his statistics would have been out of this world. He earned one MVP in his 10 years, had he been able to play longer who knows how good he could have been.
What are some of the things that stuck out to you in this book?
One of the things that I really noticed was that under suck intense amounts of pressure Rachel and Jackie Robinson grew closer and their marriage got stronger. It really is incredible to think of how much external turmoil there was outside that marriage, and to see, at least as far as we can know, that the external influences pushed them together rather than driving them apart. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me, but I think there are plenty of marriages between good people that have broken up with far less to overcome.
What emotions do you have reading the story of Jackie Robinson?
Man, so many emotions. Anger at the world that he lived in. Anger at how little the world has changed. I feel inspired at everything that he overcame. There is great sadness in the cost that breaking baseball’s color barrier took on him. He died so young, and I don’t think there is any way to not place a good bit of the blame for that at everything he had to deal with. The death of his oldest son, just a year before Jackie himself would die, was heartbreaking. In a lot of ways the Jackie Robinson story isn’t a feel-good story. It was a triumph, but the racism and hatred he faced were so senseless, it’s hard to read his story and not feel like so much of a good man was spent in a fight that never should have been.
What other books about Jackie Robinson do you recommend?
First, I would say his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, is a definite must-read. Another great book is Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season by Jonathan Eig. For kids we’ve read Who Was Jackie Robinson by Gail Herman. It is part of the Who Was series of books and I think it was great for the kids to be introduced to Jackie Robinson and the topics of racism and prejudice.
Brad Meltzer has a book on Robinson in his I Am series that I haven’t read, but I suspect, given what I’ve read of Meltzer, it is good, and there is another book that I haven’t read yet, but I find intriguing, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord.
Any quotes that stuck out to you in particular?
One that really stuck with me was in the section of the book where the authors are talking about the disagreements between Robinson and Malcolm X. Robinson received a lot of criticism from people for openly going after Malcolm X and one critic told him that African Americans needed to “stick together.” Robinson replied, “I agree. I have been pleading for Negro unity for years. But if ‘sticking together’ means you continue to blindly endorse a man simply because he is black—or green—or white—when you truly feel he has been wrong, you can have that kind of sticking together. One of the most precious assets a man has is his right to speak the truth as he sees it.”
I think that quote is so interested in light of the world in which we live. Things have become so polarized that most people to be unwilling to criticize their side, truth be damned. We need more people willing to believe that the truth is a precious asset, and to be willing to speak it.