America and Baseball Excel with Diversity and Inclusion

Jordan Walker - Jackie Robinson Day (April 15, 2025)

When I look back at what I had to go through in Black baseball, I can only marvel at the many Black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go. – Jackie Robinson

The universal celebration of Jackie Robinson by major league baseball on April 15th each year pays tribute to a true American hero, a man who demonstrated incredible courage and perseverance in the face of bigotry, hostility, and hatred. It is a day when the players on every team wear number 42, the number worn by Robinson and which is permanently retired throughout professional baseball in honor of Robinson’s life and legacy. Although Robinson ultimately helped America overcome prejudice and segregation, we had a long road ahead when Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier on April 15, 1947. It would take the civil rights movement, court decisions, and momentous legislation in the following decades before the nation could achieve even a semblance of racial justice and equality. 

Within the past 100 days, due to a series of Executive Orders from President Trump, we are awash in a severe backlash against the celebration and promotion of diversity and inclusion in American life. The administration has banned books on racial equity from the U.S. Naval Academy library, deleted from government websites references to Black achievement, and threatened to withhold massive federal funds for universities that continue to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. As these dystopian measures proliferate, holding an administrative position in support of such efforts is enough to get you fired from university and government jobs. 

I believe it necessary to discuss in personal terms why celebrations and efforts to promote diversity and inclusion are so important, not only to us as individuals, but also as Americans who share a complex history and unique Constitution. For me, the most profound influences on my early views about the importance of diversity and inclusion in American life came from my interest in baseball. Let me explain.

I fell in love with baseball on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the early summer of 1967, when I was eight years old, and while throwing a rubber ball against the brick chimney on the side of my parents’ house. Careful not to miss the chimney and risk my father’s annoyance by breaking a shingle (sorry, Dad), I fielded ground balls and line drives with my newly acquired leather baseball glove as I played an imaginary game that included an elaborate set of rules and invisible teammates and opponents. At one point, I took a break and went inside to watch the NBC Game of the Week, which on that day featured the St. Louis Cardinals. I immediately fell in love with their red-and-white uniforms that displayed the Birds on the Bat, two Cardinals perched on opposite ends of a yellow bat on each player’s uniform. But I was particularly intrigued by the players on that team, a mix of races and ethnicities who played with gusto, speed, aggressive defense, and strong pitching. 

They had a first baseman named Orlando Cepeda, number 30, whose flare and enthusiasm captivated my young imagination. Cepeda hit a home run that day, which only reinforced my fascination with him. He quickly became my favorite player, a player I wished to emulate. When I played first base for much of my baseball “career” – through Little League, Junior and Senior Babe Ruth League, High School Varsity, and American Legion ball – first base was my favorite and most comfortable position. 

The Cardinals of that era included a roster of brilliant Black stars playing alongside Latino and white players that represented America at its best. I was equally enamored of Bob Gibson, who took the mound every fourth day and was the greatest Cardinals pitcher of all time, Lou Brock, the dashing base stealer and leadoff man in left field, and Curt Flood, the best center fielder in all of baseball (not to mention Bobby Tolan, a future star with the Reds, as reserve outfielder). With the Puerto Rican born Cepeda at first and Dominican born Julian Javier at second, the diversity of their starting lineup was an uplifting example of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech playing out in real life. 

At least, this is how I viewed it as a young white boy from suburban New Jersey in search of role models. And it was these Black and Latino players who formed important role models of my youth, as I watched them play seamlessly and with great chemistry alongside the white starting players (Tim McCarver, Mike Shannon, Dal Maxville, and Roger Maris) and mostly white managers and coaches on those teams. They formed a steady presence on a team that beat the Red Sox in the 1967 World Series and then lost to the Tigers in heartbreaking fashion in the final game of the 1968 World Series (a memory that to this day causes me serious mental anguish).

Julian Javier and Orlando Cepeda

By 1969, the Cardinals would add Vada Pinson in a trade with the Reds to form an all-Black outfield that combined speed, hitting, and defense with flare and excitement. And the Cardinals teams that played throughout the 1970s and 1980s consistently included a diverse mix of Black and Latino players that exemplified the Promise of America and our enduring search for a “more perfect Union.” 

All of this was further reinforced for me when I read From Ghetto to Glory by Bob Gibson, published in 1968 following the Cardinals world championship season the year before. In a powerful way that a good book can do, Gibson’s intelligent and engaging writing exposed me to the inner life and struggles of a young, proud, Black man in 1960’s America. As I described in a 2017 essay (“An Act of Quiet Contemplation: Why Reading Matters”):

Born into extreme poverty in Omaha, Nebraska, during the Great Depression, Gibson’s modest book described his coming of age as a ballplayer during an era of Jim Crow and segregation, and later, civil unrest and Black power, when America was awakened from its history of racial oppression. By taking the time to read his story, I learned to look at the world from another person’s viewpoint, and gained in knowledge and empathy what I lost in my own narrow experience. Simply reading this one book made me a better person. In a small but significant way, it changed my life.

Gibson’s story allowed me to better understand Bob Gibson the man, not just Bob Gibson the baseball player, and to understand his life experience in a more genuine and empathetic way than I could ever glean by watching him on a ballfield or television screen. This 200-page paperback book that cost 75 cents in 1968 allowed me to understand another place and time through the eyes of another person’s experience. I have never forgotten how vital an influence From Ghetto to Glory was in my life, and how the ideal vision of America as a land where everyone can make it without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity was modeled for me on the Cardinals teams of my childhood.

Tolan, Shannon, Gibson, McCarver, and Cepeda (1967 World Series)

In later years, I learned that my somewhat idealized perception of the Cardinals was experienced in real-life by the players themselves. In an interview of Curt Flood by Peter Goldenbock, later published in Spirit of St. Louis (Spike, 2000), Flood reflected on the Cardinals teams of the late 1960s, and how what was a racially and geographically diverse group of ballplayers overcame their differences to develop lasting relationships.

The men of that team were as close to being free of racist poison as a diverse group of twentieth-century Americans could possibly be. Few of them had been that way when they came to the Cardinals. But they changed. The initiative in building that spirit came from Black members of the team. . . . It began with Gibson and me deliberately kicking over traditional barriers to establish communication with the [white players].

. . . Actual friendships developed. Tim McCarver was a rugged white kid from Tennessee and we were black, black cats. The gulf was wide and deep. It did not belong there, yet there it was. We bridged it. We simply insisted on knowing him and on being known in return. The strangeness vanished. Friendship was more natural and normal than camping on opposite sides of a divide which none of us had created and from which none of us could benefit. . . .

It was baseball on a new level. On that team, we cared about each other and shared with each other, and face it, inspired each other. As friends, we had become solicitous of each other’s ailments and eccentricities, proud of each other’s strengths. We had achieved a closeness impossible by other means. . . A beautiful little foretaste of what life will be like when Americans finally unshackle themselves.

None of what Flood described would have been possible had professional baseball not intentionally promoted diversity and inclusion by opening the game to all races and ethnicities, and to consider and recruit talented ballplayers whatever their background. Only two decades earlier, Gibson, Flood, Brock, and Cepeda would not have been given a chance. And yet, it was these very players who uplifted the team and their fans, and helped them achieve greatness. And it was these players who inspired a young white boy from New Jersey to better understand how much better life is when we break down barriers of prejudice and open ourselves to the benefits of inclusion. Indeed, every stage of my personal and work life has been enhanced when diversity and inclusion were uplifted and actively sought as a worthwhile goal.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not a zero-sum game. When we celebrated Black History month with speakers and events during my time at the U.S. Attorney's Offices in Washington and Philadelphia, all of us who participated were better and more informed because of it. When those same offices actively sought to recruit and hire a diverse core of attorneys and staff, it simply meant that the pool of possible candidates was broad enough to include all qualified applicants. Everyone benefited and no one was discriminated against. When my wife's community theater group recently put on a performance of Ragtime, which explores America in the early twentieth century and examines painful aspects of its racially prejudiced and anti-immigrant past, the production required cast members that reflected the diversity of the story. The resulting performance was among the most compelling and enriching experiences of the more than two decades Andrea has been involved in community theater productions.

Diversity and inclusion in American life is not always easy. It sometimes requires an openness to vulnerability and discomfort. But the end result is personal growth and a more honest and enriched life. All of us are better when diversity and inclusion thrive. We all suffer when institutions and people ignore and suppress the rich and varied texture of our complex history.

Baseball's celebration of Jackie Robinson is an important reminder of the flawed American past, when segregation and exclusion was the norm. It is simply a fact that, for major league baseball’s history prior to Robinson, and until all teams were integrated and baseball approached the meritocracy of most professional sports today, the nostalgic history of Ruth and Gehrig, Cobb and Hornsby, DiMaggio and Greenberg, comprised a time when Blacks were excluded from baseball. Facts are a stubborn thing and efforts to hide any portion of history renders it incomplete.

The Negro Leagues were proof of how good the African American players were and have always been, how much they deserved to compete on an equal footing with their white counterparts, and how much they loved the game and wanted to be included in the American pastime. They had their own leagues, filled stadiums and parks with their own fans, and had incredibly talented players who travelled the country to play in cities where baseball was appreciated for the truly American sport it was, not for the color of a player’s skin. The color barrier existed not within the game played between the foul lines, but in the minds of the men who controlled the major leagues prior to Robinson. When the better angels finally prevailed, baseball helped lead America on its long, slow march toward equality that we are still walking to this day.

America will never achieve its true potential unless diversity and inclusion are valued and prized in all walks of life, when we recognize everyone as deserving of a chance, and provide all with equal opportunities to compete and thrive and achieve, not as Blacks or whites, Hispanics or Asians, but as Americans on a fair and even playing field, under one flag and one Constitution for all. That goal is to be cherished, not hidden.

Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Vada Pinson (1969)

A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny. – Barbara Jordan