Dixie Walker of the Dodgers: The People's Choice (review)

Written ostensibly to be a full biography of Fred "Dixie" Walker, the outfielder who played eighteen seasons (1931-1949) for the Yankees, White Sox, Tigers, Dodgers, and Pirates, this book is in reality the case for the defense. What is the charge? Students of baseball's integration know it well. Walker, born in Georgia and raised in Alabama, is accused of being one of the instigators, if not the mastermind, behind an alleged petition circulated among the Dodgers to oppose the promotion of Jackie Robinson to the major-league club in the spring of 1947.

The story of the insurrection is familiar and has been told often, perhaps nowhere more fully than in Leo Durocher's memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last. The Dodgers trained in Havana that spring and played a series of exhibition games in the Canal Zone. There, newspaperman Harold Parrott got wind of a protest brewing among the southerners on the Brooklyn roster. Parrott told manager Durocher, and he called his team together in the middle of the night in the kitchen of the barracks where they were staying. "I hear some of you players don't want to play with Robinson," Durocher said. "Well, you know what you can do with that petition. You can wipe your ass with it. Mr. [Branch] Rickey is on his way down here and all you have to do is tell him about it. I'm sure he'll be happy to make other arrangements for you."

Walker did meet with Rickey, who took him mightily to task, and a few days later the player sent a letter to the executive asking to be traded. "For reasons I don't care to go into, I feel my decision is best for all concerned," Walker wrote. There is no mention of Robinson in the letter and no mention of any petition. Nevertheless, after the season, Rickey dispatched Walker, the darling of Brooklyn's fans, to the Pirates in a six-player deal that brought Gene Mauch, Billy Cox, and Preacher Roe to the Dodgers. Walker played two seasons in Pittsburgh, batting .316 and .282, and then he retired.

Walker's biographer is the veteran sportswriter and author of more than thirty books, Maury Allen, who died in October 2010, as this review was being written. He was assisted by Dixie's daughter, Susan Walker, born in 1943 and therefore only a toddler when the events in question occurred. Allen's work is not his best. His writing is choppy and overly romantic. Susan appears to have been a loving and admiring child and an interesting person in her own right, but she readily admits that having a ballplayer for a father precluded a close relationship. "I have to admit now, all these years later," she told Allen, "I never really knew him."

Nevertheless, the case that Allen presents is clear. Dixie Walker was a southerner, but he was also a gentleman, polite and refined. If there was a petition, he argues, it certainly did not originate with him, and he did not support it. Walker had business interests at home that he thought might be threatened if he played with a black man, and he was miffed that Rickey fingered him as the ringleader. As Walker told sportswriter Ira Berkow in 1981, "I had been with the club for nine years, and I resented being the scapegoat."

Walker had arrived in Brooklyn in 1939, but he was signed originally by the Yankees. After a mere two games in the majors in 1931, he broke in for good in 1933. He was touted first as Babe Ruth's replacement, but a series of injuries set him back considerably. By the time he recovered, New York had already acquired Joe DiMaggio, and Walker was extraneous. The Yankees sold him to the White Sox in 1936, and they sent him to the Tigers in 1938. Injuries continued to take...