The Handshake that Heralded Racial Tolerance in Baseball

George Shuba, the Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder who played in three World Series during the 1950s but who was best remembered for his welcoming gesture to Jackie Robinson at home plate on the day Robinson, as a minor leaguer, broke baseball’s color barrier, died October 2014 at his home in Youngstown, Ohio. He was 89.

Playing in Brooklyn for seven seasons, Shuba was usually a backup, but he had his moments. Known as Shotgun for his ability to spray line drives, like buckshot, out of his left-handed batting stance, he batted .305 for the Dodgers’ 1952 National League pennant-winner. He was the first National Leaguer to hit a pinch-hit homer in the World Series, connecting for a two-run drive off Allie Reynolds at Yankee Stadium in Game 1 of the 1953 Series.

But his career was most pointedly defined in Jersey City, by an image at home plate at Roosevelt Stadium two years before Shuba made his major league debut.

On the afternoon of April 18, 1946, Robinson became the first black player in modern organized baseball when he made his debut with the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm team in their International League opener against the Jersey City Giants.

In the third inning, Robinson hit a three-run homer over the left-field fence. When he completed his trip around the bases, Shuba, the Royals’ left fielder and their next batter, shook his hand.

Congratulating a home-run hitter was a commonplace ritual, but Shuba’s welcome to a smiling Robinson was captured in an Associated Press photograph that has endured as a portrait of racial tolerance.

“I couldn’t care less if Jackie was Technicolor,” Shuba told The Montreal Gazette on the 60th anniversary of that handshake. “We’d spent 30 days at spring training, and we all knew that Jackie had been a great athlete at U.C.L.A. As far as I was concerned, he was a great ballplayer — our best. I had no problem going to the plate to shake his hand instead of waiting for him to come by me in the on-deck circle.”

Robinson had four hits in five plate appearances that afternoon in the Royals’ 14-1 victory. In their second game of the season, Shuba hit three home runs.

When Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, he faced the full force of racism. He heard taunting from opposing dugouts and received hate mail and death threats. But he surmounted the pressures, earning what was then the major leagues’ one Rookie of the Year award on his way to a Hall of Fame career and recognition as a civil rights pioneer.

Shuba would celebrate with Robinson and their teammates when the 1955 Dodgers captured Brooklyn’s only World Series championship.

George Thomas Shuba was born on Dec. 13, 1924, in Youngstown, where his father, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia, worked in a steel mill. He was signed by the Dodgers’ organization in 1944 after attending a tryout camp.

Shuba played in only 20 games for Montreal in 1946 before being sent to the Dodgers’ Mobile, Ala., team of the lower-classification Southern Association. He did not make his debut with the Dodgers until July 2, 1948.

Although he had a smooth hitting stroke, Shuba was hampered in Brooklyn by a knee injury he had incurred with Montreal, and he faced stiff competition getting outfield playing time. “Snider, Pafko, Furillo, they weren’t humpties,” he told the author Roger Kahn in “The Boys of Summer,” referring to Duke Snider, Andy Pafko and Carl Furillo.

In 1955, when Shuba played in his third Dodgers-Yankees World Series, he became a footnote figure in Brooklyn baseball history.

In his only appearance in that Series, Shuba grounded out pinch-hitting for second baseman Don Zimmer in the sixth inning of Game 7 at Yankee Stadium. Jim Gilliam, the Dodgers left fielder, replaced Zimmer at second, and Sandy Amoros went to left. In the bottom of the sixth, Amoros made a sparkling catch on a drive by Yogi Berra with two men on base, and the Dodgers, behind the pitching of Johnny Podres, went on to beat the Yankees, 2-0, for their Series championship.

Shuba retired after that season with a career batting average of .259 and 24 home runs. He later worked as a postal clerk in Youngstown.

In addition to his son, Michael, Shuba is survived by his wife, Kathryn; his daughters Marlene Delfranio and Marykay McNeeley; a sister, Helen Wasko; and eight grandchildren.

Shuba kept only one baseball memento from his playing days in his living room, the photograph of that handshake when he was a minor leaguer. He carried a print with him when he visited schools in the Youngstown area to speak about racial tolerance.

Michael Shuba said in an interview Tuesday that his father had taken the ball field with black players in Ohio before joining the Dodgers’ organization and that his Roman Catholic upbringing — he was an altar boy — “had an impact” on how he treated others.

When he would go home from school and report an incident of bullying, Michael Shuba said, his father would point to the image from April 1946 and say: “Look up at that photo. I want you to remember what that stands for. You treat all people equally.”