When baseball’s top newspaper called Jackie Robinson unqualified

The Sporting News predicted that Robinson wouldn’t be able to handle even White, minor-league competition.

The Jackie Robinson Statue in Journal Square in Jersey City, N.J. (JMT Photography and Media/Shutterstock.com)

By Frederic J. Frommer

Jackie Robinson, DEI hire?

That’s essentially what the publisher of the nation’s most prominent baseball publication called Robinson when he signed a minor league contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945—arguing that the man who would break baseball color’s barrier was getting special treatment because he was Black.

Eight decades before the Pentagon removed an article about Robinson’s military service in a purge of what it called diversity, equity and inclusion content before reversing course and restoring it last week, Sporting News publisher J.G. Taylor Spink claimed that Robinson wasn’t even qualified to play against white minor leaguers above the sport’s lowest levels. The “DEI hire” taunt hadn’t been coined yet, but that was the sentiment behind Spink’s critique.

After Dodgers President Branch Rickey assigned Robinson to Brooklyn’s top minor league team, the Montreal Royals of the AAA International League, Spink used the pages of his newspaper to rant that Robinson didn’t deserve the roster spot.

“Robinson, at 26, is reported to possess baseball abilities which, were he white, would make him eligible for a trial with, let us say, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class B farm at Newport News, if he were six years younger,” Spink huffed. Class B was so low in the minor league system that it no longer exists.

“The war is over,” he added. “Hundreds of fine players are rushing out of service and back into the roster of Organized Baseball. Robinson conceivably will discover that as a 26-year-old shortstop just off the sandlots, the waters of competition in the International League will flood far over his head.”

In other words, Robinson, who had hit .375 in his one season in the Negro Leagues, with the Kansas City Monarchs, wasn’t qualified for the job.

Spink’s words carried extra weight in an era in which baseball was the only team sport that mattered in the United States, and the Sporting News, known as the “Bible of Baseball,” was read by everyone in the baseball industry and many baseball fans.

Robinson quickly proved Spink wrong, batting .349 with 40 stolen bases in 1946, his sole year in the International League. That set the stage for Robinson to break the color barrier the next season in Brooklyn, where he excelled again, batting .297, stealing a league-high 29 bases, and scoring 125 runs, second in the National League.

One of the great things about sport is that it is a meritocracy, and even a racist like Spink, who opposed integration, had to change his tune at the end of Robinson’s first season with the Dodgers. In fact, the Sporting News chose Robinson as its Rookie of the Year—but gave Robinson no credit for the torment he faced that first trying season, including racist abuse from fans, players and coaches.

“In selecting the outstanding rookie of 1947, The Sporting News sifted and weighed only stark baseball values,” Spink wrote. “That Jack Roosevelt Robinson might have had more obstacles than his first-year competitors, and that he perhaps had a harder fight to gain even major league recognition, was no concern of this publication.”

“The sociological experiment that Robinson represented, the trail-blazing he did, the barriers he broke down, did not enter into the decision,” the publisher added. “He was rated and examined solely as a freshman player in the big leagues—on the basis of his hitting, his running, his defensive play, his team value. Robinson had it all, and compared to the many other first-year men that 1947 produced, he was spectacularly outstanding.”

Spink called Robinson an “eye-popper” who “has run the bases like an Ebony Ty Cobb.… Jackie Robinson has done it all, in his first year as a major leaguer. What more could anyone ask?”

Back then the award was given to the top MLB rookie for both leagues, meaning Robinson was the only recipient.

In 2021, the Baseball Writers' Association of America voted (by a margin of 97 percent) to remove Spink’s name from the Hall of Fame’s annual award for meritorious contributions to baseball writing over his past racist writings. Among the reasons was his staunch opposition to integrating baseball in the years before Robinson’s debut.

In a 1942 editorial, for example, Spink wrote that though no law prevented Blacks and whites from playing together, “neither has invited the other for the obvious reason they prefer to draw their talent from their own ranks and because the leaders of both groups know their crowd psychology and do not care to run the risk of damaging their own game.”

That reactionary writing made his subsequent praise of Robinson all the more striking. But even the most hardened opponents of baseball integration had to acknowledge Robinson’s remarkable rookie season, when he finished fifth in NL MVP voting while leading the Dodgers to their first pennant in six years.

The week after he won the award, Time put Robinson on the cover—another important milestone. In that article, the magazine mocked Spink for “grandiloquently” writing its criteria were solely “stark baseball values.”

Taking a wider lens at Robinson’s trying rookie season, Time wrote, “The ‘sociological experiment’ may not have been foremost in Taylor Spink's mind, but it was never out of Jackie's.”

Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine and other national publications. He is the author of several books, including “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals." Follow him on X and Bluesky.

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