Under Jackie's Shadow

Under Jackies Shadow is a portal to the hidden world of Minor League baseball in the era just after Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. What was it like to be Black and playing in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1965, or Memphis, Tennessee, in 1973? What was it like to play for white coaches and scouting directors from the Jim Crow South who cut their professional teeth in the segregated game before Jackie Robinson ushered in the sports integration? Or to be called into the clubhouse with your Black teammates one spring training morning in 1969 and told that to make the ballclub youd have to beat out the Black men in that room, because none of you were ever going to beat out a white player, regardless? Or to spend a staggering eight seasons playing A-ball in the Midwest League, even winning a triple crown, while watching less-talented white teammates get promoted each year while you stayed behind? The thirteen players in Under Jackies Shadow are going to tell you. The players experiences in baseballs Minor Leagues in the 1960s and 1970s do not comport with the largely celebratory tales the leagues like to tell about themselves. The Black Minor League players remained largely invisible menmost of whom couldnt be named by even the most devoted baseball followers. Based on Mitchell Nathansons interviews, Under Jackies Shadow uses the players own words to tell the unvarnished story of what it was like to be a Black baseball player navigating the wilds of professional baseballs Minor Leagues following the integration of the Major Leagues. Harrowing, beautiful, and maddening, these stories are vital to our understanding of race not only in baseball but in the United States as a whole.