Baseball provided the forum for them to fit into英文资料.pdfVIP

There is a fascinating exhibition this year at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It is called “Chasing Dreams,” and although the venue would suggest a Jewish theme, it is in fact an exhibition of how the nation’s immigrant population—Irish, Italian, Latin American, Asian, Jewish, and others—used baseball as a means of assimilating into American culture. There is, for instance, focus on what Joe DiMaggio meant to Italian-Americans, what Hank Greenberg meant to Jews, and what Roberto Clemente meant to Puerto Ricans, and how prideful those groups were in having a hero of their own to embrace. Baseball provided the forum for them to fit into conversations, when baseball conversations were abundant on every street corner. I was walking through the exhibition when it opened in April, and I spotted a letter on Washington Nationals stationery from 1953. My attention went to the three typed paragraphs, dictated to a secretary by Ossie Bluege, the team’s farm director, and sent to Mrs. Davis Sandlin, longtime assistant to Joe Engel who owned the Senators’ farm team, the Chattanooga Lookouts. There are some handwritten notes on the letter, including, “If any colored blood want to know now.” Whoa. This is 1953, six years after Jackie Robinson integrated the game. The Negro Leagues were crumbling. Not every Major League team had signed a black player. Washington was among the holdouts. The color line was supposed to be the “unwritten law” of Organized Baseball. As Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis said in 1942, “Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and never have been in the 21 years I have served. There is no rule in organized baseball prohibiting their participation and never has been to my knowledge. If Durocher, or if any other manager, or all of them, want to sign one, or 25 Negro players, it is all right with me. That is the business of the managers and the club owners. The business of