It’s impossible to miss the irony of one date in baseball history being shared by one of its most significant hirings and one of its most significant firings.
April 8, 1975, marked the day Frank Robinson managed his first major-league game for the Cleveland Indians, the first African American to do so. Twelve years later, the Los Angeles Dodgers fired Al Campanis, their general manager, two days after an interview on ABC’s “Nightline” that exposed the attitudes in management that made those like Robinson still so scarce to that point.
To this point as well, in 2019, with Robinson and Campanis passed away and with exactly one black manager, the Dodgers’ Dave Roberts, in the majors (although there are four other non-white managers among the other 29). But that’s a topic for another date.
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In 1987, however, it’s important to note that the issue was raised with Campanis by anchor Ted Koppel in the late-night news show specifically because that season — the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut as a player — began with no black managers. Frank Robinson spent that season as bench coach for one of the teams with which he’d made his name as a player, the Orioles; he would be promoted to manager the following year early in their infamous 0-21 start in 1988.
Still, on the night of that interview, not only was baseball devoid of black managers, it had not had one in the previous two seasons, either. The last time a team was led by an African-American skipper had been 1984, the Giants, by … Frank Robinson, fired that year during his fourth season there. (The year he was hired in San Francisco, 1981, the season began with two black managers, with Maury Wills in Seattle, but ended with only Robinson.)
That was the context for the interview, for Koppel’s question about the scarcity of black managers to Campanis — a longtime player and executive in the very organization that had integrated the playing field, and for whom Frank Robinson himself had briefly played — and Campanis’s answer: "It's just that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, a field manager, or, perhaps, a general manager."
That shook the entire baseball world and put it on notice about how ingrained their prejudices were about putting anyone other than white men in charge.
And one of the most prominent voices to speak out about it was, of course, Frank Robinson. NPR host Terry Gross interviewed him during the 1988 season in which he’d taken over the Orioles … a season which had begun, despite all the consternation over the Campanis debacle, without a black manager.
“A lot of us had been saying for years the problem existed. And the people in baseball said it did not exist,’’ Robinson told NPR then. “And finally, the closet door was opened by someone on the inside. And this dreadful secret had been exposed.
“Since Jackie Robinson broke the barrier as a player (in 1947), how many — no one until 1975 was offered a job to manage a major league ball club … And you can't tell me up until that time there were no other qualified blacks to manage in the major leagues.’’
Today, Cito Gaston is one of the 23 managers to win multiple World Series titles, and Dusty Baker is 15th on the all-time managerial wins list. Robinson managed four teams for a total of 16 seasons; he died in February at 83.
And baseball is exactly one step ahead of where it was the day Campanis’ crude honesty got him fired.
