If you could equate the amount of time and effort put in mentally and physically into succeeding on the baseball field and measured it by the dirt on your uniform, mine would have been black.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.
If my uniform doesn't get dirty, I haven't done anything in the baseball game.
And I'd be lying if I told you that as a black man in baseball I hadn't gone through worse times than my teammates.
I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today's Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.
If there was a blacker color than black, I would wear it.
And my father didn't have money for me to go to college. And at that particular time they didn't have black quarterbacks, and I don't think I could have made it in basketball, because I was only 5' 11". So I just picked baseball.
We used to look at each other and say, 'We play the same game with the same rules, the same bat, the same ball, the same field. What the hell does color have to do with it? You don't play with color. You play with talent.'
I am not merely a baseball player. I am a black man who has done what he wants, gotten what he wanted, and will continue to get it.
After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.
Many of the greatest black athletes of all time played baseball for no money and no recognition. I'm just sorry many major league fans never got to see them play, because many of them were awesome.
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