Jackie Robinson
Jackie Robinson was the handsomest man anybody ever saw. He had an unusual walk. His feet would turn in about 5 degrees as he finished each step. Once I saw him steal home at Ebbets Field... Like Babe Ruth, whose independence of mind was also resented by the bosses, Robinson wanted to manage but nobody would hire him. Roger Kahn has written a very good memoir, "Into My Own," with a revealing chapter about Robinson, who saw through the fake left but somehow fell into the false embrace of Nelson Rockefeller, David's show-off brother.
Baseball jobs were among the first to be outsourced from the United States. Starting in the early 1950s, executives of the Spalding Sporting Goods Company realized they could pay women in Haiti much less than the women of Chicopee, Mass., to wrap the horsehair at the core of the ball and stitch on the leather and stamp the thing with the League President's signature. Even then they were moving production overseas to exploit non-union labor while the AFL-CIO leaders busied themselves with fighting "Communism."