Jules Tygiel

Upon receiving my September/October newsletter from SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research) this weekend, I was incredibly saddened to find out that Jules Tygiel passed away at the age of 59 this past July.

Tygiel is most known for his book Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy, which was first published in 1983. I feel confident in saying that this is the most definitive historical account of the racial integration of Major League Baseball that has been published. I also think that this book should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the study of the history and social significance of baseball. On page 9 of the book, Tygiel argues that “the integration of baseball represented both a symbol of imminent racial challenge and a direct agent of social change. Jackie Robinson’s campaign against the color line in 1946-7 captured the imagination of millions of Americans who had previously ignored the nation’s racial dilemma. For civil rights advocates the baseball experience offered a model of peaceful transition through militant confrontation, economic pressure, and moral suasion.” In some of my own work I have suggested that the agency that Tygiel ascribes to integration in this work needs to be tempered with a fuller recognition of the politics of integration—i.e. that the way it occurred served to reinforce white privilege by consolidating control of professional baseball in the United States under white ownership. However, even as I have offered this suggestion, I have always claimed that we should not entirely discount Tygiel’s argument here. Integration as it proceeded had both its progressive and its conservative aspects. Based on other things I’ve read from him and from the one time that I spoke personally with him, I think that Tygiel would not disagree.

I met Tygiel once—at the NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture conference in Tucson, Arizona, in the spring of 2004. He attended the panel on which I presented a paper based on interviews that I had done with folks who had been Dodger fans when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. He participated in the discussion afterward and spoke with me personally after the panel had concluded. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, though I later regretted that I didn’t politely ask him one question for which I had wanted an answer for awhile: how to pronounce his last name. I had never met anyone else who, upon my asking, knew for sure how to pronounce his last name. Meanwhile, I had always felt a little embarrassed every time I had to say his last name while citing him in a presentation—which was often, since I’ve been studying the Brooklyn Dodgers, including their role in integration, for years—since I was unsure whether or not I was saying it correctly. That conversation in 2004 had been my chance to ask him directly and hours later I realized I had blown it. Unfortunately, it was his obituary in the New York Times that finally gave me my answer when I read it today.