Scouting Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson and Clyde Sukeforth in 1947

While baseball today celebrates the 78th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the major leagues’ color barrier, few remember Robinson's manager with the Brooklyn Dodgers in that historic debut is Clyde Sukeforth – the scout largely responsible for bringing the infielder from the Negro Leagues to Brooklyn.

After scouting Robinson for Dodgers team president Branch Rickey, Sukeforth joins Brooklyn's coaching staff in advance of Robinson’s debut there on April l5, 1947.

Sukeforth, though, quickly finds himself becoming the Dodgers’ interim manager when commissioner Happy Chandler suspends the pugnacious Leo Durocher for “conduct detrimental to baseball” and, well, probably for just being Leo Durocher.

“I was just the right person at the right place at the right time,” Sukeforth later says of being Robinson’s first manager in the majors.

Sukeforth, then 45, wins his first two games as Brooklyn’s manager and promptly steps down, leaving another longtime scout and onetime manager, Burt Shotton, to lead the Dodgers for the rest of their pennant-winning season in 1947.

After leaving the dugout, Sukeforth, like everyone else, sits back and watches as Robinson puts together a Hall of Fame career with the Dodgers, a career in the majors that runs from 1947-56 with a first-ballot election to Cooperstown coming just five years after Robinson’s retirement.

“Many people have the impression that I was the first man to scout Jackie Robinson, but everybody in America knew what talent he had,” Sukeforth says. “Nobody but Branch Rickey deserves any credit. They have given me too much credit.”

Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese

Exactly 50 years to the day of Robinson’s Dodgers debut in 1947, baseball commissioner Bud Selig publicly directs all teams to retire Robinson’s No. 42.

“Thinking about the things that happened, I don’t know any other ballplayer who could have done what he did,” Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese later says of Robinson and the verbal abuse he watches his teammate endure throughout his 10-year career with the Dodgers.

“To be able to hit with everybody yelling at him, he had to block all that out, block out everything but this ball that is coming in at a hundred miles an hour,” Reese says. “To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I’ve ever seen in sports.”