When Flaherty and Fowler stood up for justice, St. Louis Cardinals teammates sat down
Major League Baseball will celebrate Jackie Robinson on Friday, shifting its annual day in honor of the player who broke baseball’s color barrier from the date of his debut — April 15th, 1947 — August 28th, representing both the day in 1945 on which Branch Rickey informed Robinson he would one day play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was also this day in 1963 on which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and told the world he had a dream.
This year’s celebration comes in the immediate aftermath of another landmark intersection of race relations and civil rights in America, as players across a wide variety of sports, both in the United States and abroad, responded to the shooting of Jacob Blake by police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin by walking out and refusing to play.
It was a moment, said St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jack Flaherty, that demanded togetherness.
“I don’t have an answer to that one,” Flaherty said Thursday when asked if baseball should be played. “Whatever it was gonna be, it needed to be unified.”
This moment in history demands reflection and courage from society at large but it also calls upon athletes to perform one of the simplest and most fundamental tasks in sports — it calls upon athletes to stand up for their teammates.
One of the more famous incidents in Robinson’s rookie season involves Hall of Fame shortstop Pee Wee Reese. Reese, as the story goes, walked from his position across the field to throw an arm around Robinson at first base.
He made a point to stride across the diamond and, in front of the world and a rabidly racist public, literally embraced a teammate because, simply, his teammate was in need of support, and it was the right thing to do.
Dexter Fowler and Jack Flaherty’s teammates did not provide that comfort.
The two Cardinals — the team’s only two who have publicly identified as Black — chose not to play in Wednesday night’s game. Other players across the Major Leagues made that same choice. Whole teams opted not to play; 10 games involving 20 teams were postponed to allow players to stand in solidarity with those taking action in other sports.
Only two teams had individual players opt not to play without postponing a full game — the Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, for whom outfielder Jason Heyward was a healthy scratch on Wednesday night.
The Cubs did not have a game scheduled for Thursday.
Second baseman Kolten Wong, who is Hawaiian, and outfielder Tyler O’Neill, who is a white Canadian, spoke of the support they felt they offered Flaherty and Fowler. It was clear, they said, that the team stood behind the decision of the two not to play. In any event, they explained, the decision happened close to game time. O’Neill further described the struggles the Cardinals face in attempting to finish a schedule radically reshaped by the team’s coronavirus outbreak.
And yet, the decision not to play came in time for Fowler and Flaherty. The challenges of the schedule did not drive them reluctantly back to the field.
Flaherty wasn’t scheduled to pitch on Wednesday, and so he cast his decision not to play as less significant than Fowler’s, who pulled himself from the starting lineup.
Even still, Flaherty was asked Thursday if he felt he truly had the support of his Cardinals teammates in his decision not to play.
He did not say yes.
“I didn’t expect anybody to be like, hey, let’s pull out of this game and not play,” Flaherty said before Thursday’s action. “You know, we were hoping for — kind of have more a, you know — it’s tough. Because yesterday would’ve been the day for a league-wide action. And it wasn’t able to happen league wide yesterday...
“It sucks, because you’d love for it to be a unified thing. And I love our guys for going out and playing and winning. And they texted us right afterward. I wanted them to just — I said, this ain’t about me right now. I said, Dex needs your support. I don’t want him to feel like he’s on an island...
“He knows you guys support him, and — but just let him know. I’m proud of the way that they went out and played the game and the way that they battled back, and they’re gonna go out there and play today.”
Contrast that with the words of Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts, who told his teammates he could not take the field and heard in response that they would not take the field without him.
“I’ll always remember this day and I’ll always remember this team having my back,” Betts told reporters.
Contrast too with the actions of another Dodger — Reese.
The tale of the arm around Jackie Robinson’s shoulders may well be apocryphal; there’s very little contemporary reporting of the event, and that which exists is told as a recollection. The story, though, holds sway, because it’s a story of togetherness. The point is that you don’t have to live someone’s struggle to support them through it. You don’t act as an ally by sending a private text message late at night after a ball game.
You hold on to your brother because he needs it, and the rest of us are meant to learn from the example.
That’s not the example the St. Louis Cardinals set this week.
The story, this time, deserved to be true.
This story was originally published August 29, 2020 at 8:00 AM with the headline "When Flaherty and Fowler stood up for justice, St. Louis Cardinals teammates sat down."
