Jackie Robinson, DEI hire?

That’s essentially what the publisher of the nation’s most prominent baseball publication called Robinson when he signed a minor league contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945—arguing that the man who would break baseball color’s barrier was getting special treatment because he was Black.

Eight decades before the Pentagon removed an article about Robinson’s military service in a purge of what it called diversity, equity and inclusion content before reversing course and restoring it last week, Sporting News publisher J.G. Taylor Spink claimed that Robinson wasn’t even qualified to play against white minor leaguers above the sport’s lowest levels. The “DEI hire” taunt hadn’t been coined yet, but that was the sentiment behind Spink’s critique.

After Dodgers President Branch Rickey assigned Robinson to Brooklyn’s top minor league team, the Montreal Royals of the AAA International League, Spink used the pages of his newspaper to rant that Robinson didn’t deserve the roster spot.

“Robinson, at 26, is reported to possess baseball abilities which, were he white, would make him eligible for a trial with, let us say, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class B farm at Newport News, if he were six years younger,” Spink huffed. Class B was so low in the minor league system that it no longer exists.

“The war is over,” he added. “Hundreds of fine players are rushing out of service and back into the roster of Organized Baseball. Robinson conceivably will discover that as a 26-year-old shortstop just off the sandlots, the waters of competition in the International League will flood far over his head.”