Brooklyn’s got a winning team

In the year 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers won their first world series ever, destroying the thirteen year winning streak of the New York Yankees; Brooklyn came out with four wins, trouncing New York’s three wins. Not only is this a major breakthrough for Brooklyn, but it only highlights the breakthrough society has made in time. Since the year 1947, the world of Major League Baseball has been significantly altered, and the Dodgers gave birth to this fundamental change. This was the year that Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Johnson was drafted into the “big leagues.” Given, a baseball team does consist of nine strong players on the field; it has been assumed that the dodgers would have never made it as far as they did if it was not for Jackie Robinson. Though the year the World Series was won was Robinson’s worst year, the rest of his baseball career consisted of 1,518 hits and 137 home runs. His talent and simply the fact that he was on the team is crucial to the mid-twentieth century. Robinson was the first African-American Major League Baseball player of the modern era, ending a nearly sixty-year era of segregation in professional baseball. Because so many people were involved in sports, Robinson was one of the key components in the Civil Rights Movement, inadvertently helping to launch the efforts of thousands of people across the nation. Though this appears to be completely positive and of huge significance to the twentieth century societal improvements, there were downfalls that are scarcely recognized to this day. Four years before this epic World Series event, on May 20th of 1951, hate mail was sent to Jackie Robinson and this was only one day out of the hundreds that he had to deal with it. The first of which stated “We have already got rid of several like you…One was found in river just recently” and the second was not even close to better, reading “Robinson, we are going to kill you if you attempt to enter a ball game at Crosley Field…[signed] The Travelers.” The wife of Robinson even states that “when Jack started getting hate mail, we worried about the children and their playing outside.” Even though situations may appear to be great on the surface, the constant racism that was still occurring in the United States created a morose undercoating to a seemingly excellent condition. Despite the hate mail sent to him, Jackie Robinson’s talent could not be denied of him and he became a baseball legend. Unfortunately, a combination of heart disease and diabetes weakened Robinson enough that he died of a heart attack on October 24, 1972. Robinson’s jersey number, 42, was retired and no one can wear it to this day. During the year 1919, a legend was born and Jackie Robinson will never be forgotten.