by Cary Osborne
Four men stood in solidarity on Wednesday night, minutes after it was announced their baseball game in San Francisco would not be played.
A Black man — the son of a Vietnam veteran — stood next to the first Black manager in his team’s more than century-old history. That manager, the son of a Marine and the father of biracial children, stood next to a white man, who has traveled to different parts of the globe on missions for human rights. That white man stood next to a multilingual man from Curacao.
They explained, on a historic day in sports, why human rights are bigger than the game.
“This is a unique situation for all of us and what’s going on in our country — the recent happenings in Wisconsin,” said Dodger manager Dave Roberts. “Players and coaches came together — Dodgers, Giants — feeling that to not play tonight, allowing us to use our platform, to use our voices to let the world know and the country know how sad and how frustrated and angered we all are.”
What began in the early hours of the afternoon when the Milwaukee Bucks — as a team — decided not to play Game 5 of their NBA Playoffs series continued throughout the day as more sports teams followed. Players and teams decided not to play on Wednesday in response to the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by police on Aug. 23 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As that city — like Minneapolis in May after the death of George Floyd — has reacted in anger and frustration, it has moved athletes to use their voices.
Mookie Betts — that son of a Vietnam veteran, who kneeled on Opening Day during the national anthem while two white teammates put their hands on his shoulders in support — catalyzed the Dodgers’ decision not to play on Wednesday. He explained to his teammates that he could not play, and they decided as a team to support him and the other Black members of the team — Roberts, first base coach George Lombard and strength and conditioning coach Travis Smith.
“There’s a lot going on this world and change needs to be made,” Betts said. “I’ve used my platform to at least get the ball rolling. I talked to my teammates and told them how I felt, and they were all by my side. And I can’t ask for better teammates than I have here. And I just appreciate everything that was said and everything that’s been done so far.”
Kershaw, who has traveled to Africa and the Dominican Republic on humanitarian trips and has worked for years to create educational opportunities for children, spoke about the need to stand by his baseball family during this time.
“As a white player on this team is, how can we show support? What’s something tangible that we can do to help our black brothers on this team? Once Mookie said that he wasn’t going to play, that really started our conversation as a team as what we can do to support that,” Kershaw said. “Mookie was great in that he said if you guys want to play, I support that. But we made a collective group decision to let our voices be heard — to stand up for what we believe is right.”
Jansen, an often emotional man, from the island nation Curacao, said: “This is a beautiful country. It’s time now to have change. All eyes in this world are on America. We want to see that change, just make that statement here that peace and love will come, and hopefully the whole world will come together.”
This week, the Dodgers and Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation are celebrating the life and legacy of Jackie Robinson through virtual educational events. Aug. 28 marks the 75th anniversary of Robinson’s first meeting with Dodger president Branch Rickey — a precursor to Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier in 1947. Today is the 73rd anniversary of the Major League debut of Dan Bankhead, who as a Dodger became the first Black pitcher in MLB history. On Friday, MLB will celebrate a league-wide Jackie Robinson Day.
In a week that recognizes acts of change, the Dodgers — men with different skin colors and backgrounds and stories — made a collective statement for new progress.
“We’re baseball players. We love to play baseball. These guys are great at playing baseball. But we talked a lot about the game is bigger than all of us, and there is no bigger issue than right now what’s going on,” Roberts said. “This is a human being issue, and we all need to be treated the same way. And a black man being shot seven times in the back, we need to be better than that. That just can’t happen.”
