Chicago's SouthSide Baseball Little Leaguers Provide Inspiration and Hope

Chicago's Jackie Robinson West provide inspiration at Little League World Series

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, August 22, 2014, 1:00 AM

The kids from Jackie Robinson Park in Chicago, America's most dangerous city, battle their way into the Little League World Series championship and inspire many, including Rachel Robinson, along the way.

Once the late Kirby Puckett came out of the South Side of Chicago, came out of the Robert Taylor Houses to become one of the great baseball players, and finally a World Series champion with his Minnesota Twins.

And Kirby and I were talking once, before he retired and before he died much too young, about what it was like to be an inner-city kid, in a neighborhood like his, and still dream big about the big leagues.

“You know what our real dream was?” Kirby said. “It was about green-grass fields.”

Now all this time later, the team from Jackie Robinson Park on the Far South Side of Chicago, a team known to the country as Jackie Robinson West, has played on the most famous green-grass Little League Field anywhere in Williamsport, Pa. And on Thursday night it beat the Little League World Series’ cover girl, Mo’ne Davis, on national television, what on this night felt like the biggest game in the world.

This spectacular girl, of course, has electrified the World Series and everyone who has watched her pitch and knows her story. But there is no bigger story in baseball, in the last weeks of such a sad and dangerous summer in this country’s inner cities, than this team from the South Side with 13 African-American players, uniting a great American city and making the rest of us cheer our heads off.

Sixty-seven years after Jackie Robinson, as important a civil rights figure as America has ever produced and will ever produce, ran out to first base one afternoon at Ebbets Field to play a game of baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers — not just integrating Major League Baseball that day but, in the words of Pete Hamill, integrating the stands as well — these kids have honored his spirit and his memory, all the way to Williamsport.

They have done this at a time when we are reminded, with the sad and frightening and violent images we get out of Ferguson, Mo., that all this time after Jackie Robinson did all he could, because of the force of his talent and his character, to make the country better, that race remains the third rail in America. That does not change in America the way pictures like the ones we have seen constantly over the past week don’t change, and always seem to be one shove or shot or even chokehold away from making things explode all over again.

As dangerous as Ferguson has become lately, there has been no more dangerous city in America, because of guns and gun violence, in the recent past than Chicago. Too many guns, too many gangs, too many dead children, too many children at risk. A fine Little League baseball team does not change any of that. But somehow these past weeks, it has given a neighborhood and a city, given all of us, some hope.

Even in the summer of Mo’ne Davis, the Little League star out of Pennsylvania, they have even made the great Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, the First Lady of baseball in this country, take notice, and take time to write to the kids from Jackie Robinson West. Here is a copy of the letter she sent to Pierce Jones, one of JRW’s star players, that Mrs. Robinson sent on stationery from the Jackie Robinson Foundation, last week:

“Dear Pierce,

I have been following your tremendous march to the Little League World Series and am so proud of you and the entire Jackie Robinson West team. To have an African-American squad from Chicago, the first from the city to qualify for the Series since 1983, succeed and inspire other young men and women is so meaningful.

Thank you for upholding the legacy of my husband Jack, your namesake, through your hard work, dedication and excellent teamwork.

I congratulate you for winning the Great Lakes Championship and your first game in the Series. Please know that as you continue to play for the title, you give so many of us hope and inspiration.

Good luck with your upcoming games!

My very best wishes,
Rachel Robinson.

This is a time when African-American participation in baseball, the sport of Rachel Robinson’s husband, has been decreasing at an alarming rate. In so many ways, it is a far more serious problem than the length of games and pace of play, something about which critics of baseball obsess about constantly. But now here is Mo’ne Davis on the cover of Sports Illustrated, here came these terrific kids from Jackie Robinson Park on the South Side of Chicago, to make the face of the national pastime quite different for a little while, and really quite wonderful.

Somehow the two stories intersected in Williamsport on Thursday night, in front of another huge crowd in the stadium that has become the dream of all Little League kids, an iconic American event now made so much bigger by ESPN. Chicago got ahead, held on, and won, 6-5.

One of those teams, a bunch of kids from what has become a far too dangerous city, came to the moment representing a name that will always be treated like royalty in this country and in this sport. The Cubs are nothing again in baseball, and the White Sox won’t make the playoffs even if they have won a World Series in this century. Jackie Robinson West has become that city’s team, and would have felt like the whole country’s team if it wasn’t going up against Mo’ne Davis’ team in Williamsport, Pa.

At a time in Chicago when we have read too many stories about gun deaths and tragedies, here come these tough, smiling kids to breathe this kind of life into the Little League World Series, and into baseball. Rachel Robinson wrote of how they inspire young men and women. The truth is, they have made us all cheer. So would have Jack Roosevelt Robinson.