As part of Major League Baseball’s upcoming event at Rickwood Field, AL.com and The Birmingham News will be producing weekly stories that showcase the history of Rickwood Field, and history of baseball in the state of Alabama.
“Rickwood: The legacy of America’s oldest ballpark” takes a deep dive into stories from the Negro Leagues to MLB icons playing at the historic venue, and how things are progressing as “MLB at Rickwood Field” takes place on June 20, 2024, between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals.
Between them, they had more than 5,000 hits in the major leagues, played in 11 All-Star Games and seven World Series, and managed a total of 20 years.
All four are members of the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, certifying them as baseball legends in their home state.
But the legacies of Ben Chapman, Dixie Walker, Harry Walker and Bobby Bragan are a complicated one. All four men, all of them white and all lifelong Birmingham residents, played a role (or have long been alleged to have played a role) in the leadup to and the fallout from the most-important moment in baseball history — the sport’s integration by Jackie Robinson in 1947.
Bragan and Dixie Walker were teammates of Robinson’s on the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers; Chapman and Harry Walker opponents on other National League teams. Each man met that moment — and others to follow — in a different way, though only one emerged with his reputation and legacy clean.
The last of this four-part series examines the life and career of Bobby Bragan, the backup catcher on the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers who was first opposed to the idea of Robinson as a teammate, but later became his close friend.
Part IV: Bobby Bragan — ‘He made me a better man’
There’s no question that Bobby Bragan was vocally opposed to Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, for the simple fact that Robinson was Black.
But there’s also little question that Bragan — a Birmingham native and Brooklyn’s backup catcher in 1947 — has emerged as a positive figure in baseball’s integration story. It comes down to one word — contrition.
Throughout a life that spanned 92 years and a baseball career that lasted nearly as long, Bragan spoke openly about his resistance to becoming a teammate of Robinson. He also continually displayed — through both word and action — how playing with and eventually befriending Robinson had changed him in a positive way.
“He made me a better man,” Bragan told interviewer Larry King in a 2007 documentary about the Brooklyn Dodgers, “and I was really grateful to him.”
Born Oct. 17, 1917 in Birmingham, Bragan was the second of seven brothers — four of whom would become professional baseball players, coaches, managers and/or executives. Bobby made the major leagues with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1940, then was traded to Brooklyn three years later.
After missing two years due to military service, Bragan re-joined the Dodgers in time for the 1947 season. Never much of a hitter, he was ticketed for limited playing time behind future All-Star catcher Bruce Edwards.
Robinson had signed with the Dodgers while Bragan was in the Army, and had led Montreal to the International League pennant in 1946. Team president Branch Rickey made plans the following year for him to become the first African-American to play for a previously all-white MLB team in more than 60 years.
Like many of the Southern-born players on the Dodgers — including fellow Alabamian Dixie Walker — Bragan was appalled. Rumors spread that spring that several of the Dodgers planned to sign a petition stating their wishes not to play with Robinson, with Bragan among the alleged conspirators.
After manager Leo Durocher read the players the riot act during a late-night spring training meeting, several backed down from their strike threat. Bragan stood fast, until being called into a one-on-one meeting with Rickey.
The meeting grew heated, and Bragan eventually stormed out. But that was not until after the two had an exchange that would change the course of Bragan’s baseball career and his life.
“If Jackie Robinson can play the position better than another player, then regardless of the color of his skin Jackie Robinson is going to play,” Rickey said. “You understand that, Bobby?”
“Yes sir,” Bragan responded.
The rest of the conversation went something like this, according to a 2018 report by longtime baseball writer Joe Posnanski:
Rickey: “And how do you feel about this?”
Bragan: “If it’s all the same with you, Mr. Rickey, I’d like to be traded to another team.
Rickey: “If we call Jackie Robinson up, will you change the way you play for me?”
Bragan: “No sir. I’d still play my best.”
Rickey decided to keep Bragan around. By Opening Day on April 15, both he and Robinson were Dodgers.
It’s worth noting that Bragan was a marginal player, barely hanging on to a roster spot. He batted just 43 times in all of 1947, and hit just .240 with only 15 home runs in seven major-league seasons.
So it stands to reason that Bragan would quickly realize he was expendable — unlike his fellow malcontent Walker, an All-Star who was wildly popular with fans. Thus, he reversed course rather rapidly.
“There are some people when faced with the decision, turn better,” Allen Barra, a Birmingham native and longtime sports writer and author, told AL.com. “Leo Durocher told the players ‘Keep this in mind, he’s just the first. It’s going to happen. Our world is going to change and there’s nothing we can do to stop it from changing.’
“And I think a lot of guys stopped regarding it as ‘he’s going to take my job’ and realized ‘maybe we’ve been taking their jobs all these years.’ I think it changed very quickly. In a sport where you had to play together, you were dependent on the other guys on the team.”
However it happened, though, Bragan soon recognized not only the caliber of player Robinson was — he was named National League Rookie of the Year in 1947 and led the Dodgers to the World Series — but also the high level of his character.
“After just one road trip, I saw the quality of Jackie the man and the player,” Bragan told MLB.com in 2005. “I told Mr. Rickey I had changed my mind and I was honored to be a teammate of Jackie Robinson.”
Bragan and Robinson played together only two years, as Bragan was out of the league by the end of the 1948 season (he later said he was “proud” to have lost his place on the team to fellow catcher Roy Campanella, a Black man). The two remained friends, however, and Robinson asked Bragan to contribute an essay to his 1964 book “Baseball Has Done It,” an oral history of the sport’s integration.
Bragan wrote about how growing up in the segregated South had made it difficult to accept Robinson as an equal, but also how interacting with his new teammate had changed his mind and his heart.
“I think it’s just a matter of becoming acclimated to the thing by association,” Bragan wrote. “I was exposed to integration daily under the shower, in the next locker, on the bus, in the hotel and many conversations. … All this adds up to a tolerant attitude, a little more understanding of the situation than if we’d never left Alabama.”
“I learned,” he added some years later. “Not fast. But l learned.”
Bragan’s story does not end there, however. He spent the next six decades not only telling people what being Robinson’s teammate had taught him about race relations, but putting those lessons into action.
Bragan worked the half-decade following the end of his playing career as a minor-league manager before Rickey — who had left Brooklyn and become team president in Pittsburgh — hired him to manage the Pirates in 1956. He spent two years in Pittsburgh, one in Cleveland and the four with the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves, in addition to several stops as a scout, minor-league manager and major-league coach.
Wherever he went, Bragan was said to be “especially good at working with black ballplayers,” according to Robinson biographer Jules Tygiel. None other than Henry Aaron praised him for “empathizing with the problems peculiar to the black player.”
A notable example of Bragan’s managerial touch involves African-American shortstop Maury Wills, the 1962 National MVP with the Dodgers and one of the great leadoff men and base stealers in baseball history. Bragan managed Wills at Spokane in 1959, the 26-year-old Wills’ ninth season in the minors.
Wills had always batted exclusively right-handed, until one day Bragan suggested he try switch-hitting. Though Wills admitted he was at first suspicious of Bragan due to his initial refusal to play with Robinson in 1947, he accepted his manager’s invitation to join him early the next day at the ballpark for extra work.
Wills spent the morning working on hitting from the left side. Bragan also schooled him on bunting and slapping the ball to the left side of the infield, in order to take advantage of his speed.
“It was the first time I got any personal attention in my whole minor league career,” Wills told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2013.
Wills batted .313 in 48 games with Spokane in 1959, and was finally called up to the Dodgers in June based partly on Bragan’s recommendation. He hit .304 the rest of the way and started all six games of L.A.’s World Series victory that October.
Wills spent 14 years with the Dodgers, making six All-Star teams and playing in four World Series. He later became an MLB manager himself with the Seattle Mariners in 1980.
Bragan was appointed as president of the Double-A Texas League in 1969, and later worked in the MLB commissioner’s office and for the Texas Rangers in addition to operating the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation, which had awarded more than 800 scholarships as of 2019. At age 87 in 2005, he managed one game for the Fort Worth Cats of the independent Central League, becoming the oldest manager in professional baseball history.
Bragan died in 2010, leaving behind a lifetime of baseball memories and stories. His association with Jackie Robinson, however, was perhaps that of which he was most proud, often noting that the two sat together at Rickey’s funeral in 1965.
“At first we didn’t want to get close to (Robinson),” Bragan told Bill Lumpkin Jr. of the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1997. “(Later), Dixie, or me or any of the others accused of being an ‘anti’ were just as anxious to sit down with him in the dining car as the next one on road trips.
“He was the best player. He had won us all over.”
Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has written about sports for a variety of publications since 1994. Contact him at cstephenson@al.com or follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.
