Recent Jackie Robinson Commentaries

Featured image for “Something Like a War”
Something Like a War
I’ve been revisiting Ken Burns’ series on the history of baseball, and it sparked some interesting comparisons to a subject that headlines the news daily. Baseball values sportsmanship, fairness, and integrity. Politics far too often involves the polar opposite. While character has once been evident in the halls of Congress (I haven’t figured out which halls, yet), it now seems...
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January 27, 2025
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We Need the Strength of Heroes
The Date: September 28, 1955 The Place: Yankee Stadium The Event: Dodgers/Yankees, Game 1 of the 1955 World Series Every baseball fan has seen the video. Every baseball fan knows the outcome . . . or do they? I’ll come back to this. For my book, What Do You Stand For?, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns spoke to me about the...
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April 19, 2024
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April 15, 1947
At the end of the month, 30 teams will step out of the dugout to begin another season of Major League Baseball. Thirty rookies are among them. Seventy-six years ago, a rookie stepped out of the dugout and into history. His name was Jack Roosevelt Robinson. In a conversation for my book, What Do You Stand For? documentarian Ken Burns...
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March 7, 2023
Read Some of the Most Recent Articles
The Latest... And Often Greatest
Looking for America’s Soul
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us;...
Here We Are Again
CONTEMPT—Raw, in-your-face, unapologetic, and morally bankrupt. Every so often, the country reaches a point where character is not an abstraction but a requirement. We’re in...
The Steady Endurance of Leadership
I recently read about a group of explorers who located a ship deep beneath the dark, cold waters off Antarctica: a vessel whose very name...
Under the Wild Sky, We Gather
Wisconsin’s night sky opened to a rare sight, one usually reserved for places far colder and farther north—the Northern Lights. The colors pulled against each...
London, 1943.
In a war that hammered away and left families lying awake at night counting the seconds between sirens, John Gilbert Winant, America’s ambassador to Britain,...
Faith in The Goodness of Ordinary People, Even in The Darkest Hours
During his years in wartime London, U.S. Ambassador John Gilbert Winant absorbed the suffering around him. He was known for walking the streets during the...