Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: black ballplayers, New York, Branch Rickey, World Series (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The author of the acclaimed Luckiest Man (2005)a biography of Lou Gehrig, turns here to another great American sportsman, Jackie Robinson. So elegant in its logic is Eig's angle--chronicling Robinson's first major-league season (1947) with the Brooklyn Dodgers--it's a wonder no one thought of it before. From Robinson's preseason call-up by Brooklyn's legendary GM, Branch Rickey, to the 1947 World Series, in which the Dodgers took the Yankees to a seventh game (Brooklyn lost), Eig details the dynamics of Robinson's hard-earned acceptance by teammates, the well-chronicled abuse Robinson took from opposing fans and players, the response of local and out-of-town press, and the impact the season had on Robinson's family and on African Americans. Eig also shows what a flat-out great player Robinson was that season. If Eig's workmanlike writing style doesn't necessarily pull the reader along, his account of the Dodgers' dramatic 1947 pennant race will. Even Dodger haters--and they are legion--will cheer on the Bums in this fine account. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description

April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first black man to break into major-league baseball in the twentieth century. World War II had just ended. Democracy had triumphed. Now Americans were beginning to press for justice on the home front -- and Robinson had a chance to lead the way.

He was an unlikely hero. He had little experience in organized baseball. His swing was far from graceful. And he was assigned to play first base, a position he had never tried before that season. But the biggest concern was his temper. Robinson was an angry man who played an aggressive style of ball. In order to succeed he would have to control himself in the face of what promised to be a brutal assault by opponents of integration.

In Opening Day, Jonathan Eig tells the true story behind the national pastime's most sacred myth. Along the way he offers new insights into events of sixty years ago and punctures some familiar legends. Was it true that the St. Louis Cardinals plotted to boycott their first home game against the Brooklyn Dodgers? Was Pee Wee Reese really Robinson's closest ally on the team? Was Dixie Walker his greatest foe? How did Robinson handle the extraordinary stress of being the only black man in baseball and still manage to perform so well on the field? Opening Day is also the story of a team of underdogs that came together against tremendous odds to capture the pennant. Facing the powerful New York Yankees, Robinson and the Dodgers battled to the seventh game in one of the most thrilling World Series competitions of all time.

Drawing on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, as well as newly discovered material from archives around the country, Jonathan Eig presents a fresh portrait of a ferocious competitor who embodied integration's promise and helped launch the modern civil-rights era. Full of new details and thrilling action, Opening Day brings to life baseball's ultimate story. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1St Edition edition (March 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743294602
• ISBN-13: 978-0743294607
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #487,219 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Before Martin Luther King, There Was Jackie Robinson, April 7, 2007

By	C. W. Emblom "Bill Emblom" (Ishpeming, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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The story of Jackie Robinson has been told in several books by many distinguished authors. Now Jonathan Eig, author of the definitive book on Lou Gehrig, has given us a fresh look at the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947, which was Robinson's initial season with the team. First let me say this man (Eig) can write. This is not a rehash of other stories you may have read. The author skillfully weaves the role of influential individuals such as Branch Rickey, Pee Wee Reese, Harry "The Hat" Walker, Leo "The Lip" Durocher, Burt Shotten, Eddie "The Brat" Stanky, Dick Young of the New York Daily News, and others in this historic story. Baseball rosters were heavily made up of players from the south. The Dodgers were no exception, and they brought their long held prejudices along with them. You may think you have heard all the anecdotes relating to Robinson and the Dodgers, but the gifted author of this book will provide you with nuggets of information culled from a variety of sources. Years after the fact, several former Dodger players said Robinson "made them better men." However, the author notes, these claims were made only after supporting civil rights became fashionable. In 1947, when Robinson needed these friends, he found none on the Dodgers. At least significant ones! Reese developed a genuine friendship with Robinson, but in 1947 Pee Wee was one of the boys and whether the often told incident of him supporting Robinson in Cincinnati when he was being heckled is open to question. At least for 1947. This is quite simply one of the very best of hundreds of baseball books that I have read. It is definitely a keeper for anyone's library. It's a great story, especially with the 60th anniversary rapidly approaching. I can't wait to see what this new author, Jonathan Eig, is preparing for us to read next.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book - for both history and enjoyment, March 24, 2007

By	Scott Schleifer (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just finished Jonathan Eig's book "Opening Day", and loved it. Like his earlier work "Luckiest Man", Eig sticks to facts and historical sources (interviews [old and new], newspaper sources) and is able to separate some of the myths surrounding Jackie Robinson and the 1947 season from the truth. For example, the story about Pee Wee Reese draping his arm around Robinson's shoulder in Cincinnati in 1947. Great story, but not much fact supporting whether it happened. Eig reports the known sources and lets the reader decide whether to believe the facts or the myth (in this case, I like the myth!).

This is the first book that I know of that chronicles the 1947 season (w/some "flashbacks", which are necessary to understand some of the people and the culture and thought of the time). Eig's writing style keeps the reader interested, as Robinson joins the Dodgers after a year with the minor league Montreal Royals, proceeds to take the field and ultimately become Major League Rookie of the Year - there was only one for both leagues at the time. Interviews with Rachel Robinson, Jackie's wife, show both the courage Robinson shows, as well as the emotional turmoil, as Robinson had promised Branch Rickey that he would not fight his tormentors.

As the season progresses, Eig does a great job of how Robinson's Dodger teammates loosen up to him, believing that his playing as a ballplayer is more important than skin color. By the end of the season, Ralph Branca is catching Robinson who is diving for a foul ball, something that might not have happened earlier in the year. There's a great scene where Dixie Walker, possibly unfairly maligned as an instigator of a potential major league strike against Robinson, calls Robinson aside to give him batting tips. Rachel Robinson is even invited to hang with the other players' wives.

All in all, an awesome book. The cliches are true, as this is a book about courage and facing adversity, but it is also a plain old good baseball book, chronicling a very important moment and year in history, not just baseball history. I heartily recommend this book, as well as Eig's first book "Luckiest Man".

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Way to Better Understand America, April 4, 2007

By	Joel (Brooklyn, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

Once again, another Grand Slam from Jonathan Eig. I never thought there would be a book on sports better than Eig's previous book, Luckiest Man, but Opening Day is.

I'm not a sports fan at all, so it is even more remarkable that I loved both books. The reason that I did is that they both far transcended sports. Both are about universal struggles. The first was about the very personal struggle of Lou Gehrig to come to grips with an unfathomable disease that slowly but surely stripped him of his strength and life. The new book, Opening Day, is about the very public struggle of one man, Jackie Robinson, to integrate baseball.

Eig could have used flowery language and soaring rhetoric to tell this story, as so many before him have done. Ironically, it is precisely because Eig used stripped down, economical language and let the facts and actual, contemporaneous quotes speak for themselves that the book is so powerful. Eig has mastered the first rule of writing: "show, don't tell." The book is thus a matter-of-fact masterpiece. Because it is so understated, you may not realize what a tour-de-force it is until you are done reading and figure out that it knocked you for an emotional loop.

The book is masterful in describing the odd way in which Robinson was merely another worker trying hard to succeed after getting a big promotion (in this case from the minor leagues to the majors), at the same time he - and the world - knew he was making history. That resulted in an odd paradox - while much of America was wishing with all their might for Robinson to be a "credit" to his race (to put it in the patronizing parlance of the time) , and some bigots were hoping that Robinson would prove them right by disgracing his race -- Eig shows that Robinson thought that the outcome of that grand debate hinged more on whether he got base hits or not than whether the nation was emotionally ready to accept black people as equals.

Opening Day is also full of understated, dry humor, which the reader has to be on his or her toes to always pick up on. But such attention by the reader is well worth the effort.

Unlike so many other sport stories, which tell the story only from the perspective of the players, Opening Day is pitch-perfect in also telling the story from the perspectives of the fans in the stands, listening on the radio, or watching on new-fangled TVs at bars. More than that, it tells the story from the perspective of both the insanely-devoted Brooklyn fans and average Americans.

Perhaps the book's greatest achievement is how well it explains just how much Jackie Robinson meant to Black America. It reminded me that Robinson's feat came almost a decade before Brown versus Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Eig convincingly explains how revolutionary it was for Black people to have one of their men be able simply to slide into the leg of a white man in public - in the most famous national game, no less - and not only not be lynched, but be hailed as a hero. Before this book, I always thought: "So big deal, a Black guys got to play sports. Surely, segregation in baseball had to end, but it wasn't a big deal like school de-desegregation or voting rights." But this book reminds us that powerful symbols do indeed matter. By helping me understand how important Jackie Robinson was for Black America, the book helped me understand how important he was for all of America.

While the nation is still far, far from perfect, this book is a vital reminder of just how bad things were and how much progress we have made on some fronts.

I particularly enjoyed Eig's repeated quotes from African-American newspapers from around the country, who almost always had a different take on America--and Jackie Robinson - than the mainstream white press. Many of these paper's are still around today - albeit struggling -- and Eig gives them some long-overdue recognition in the wider community. To them, this just wasn't about one ballplayer - it was a crusade. Readers of Opening Day will surely agree.