Scouting Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson and Clyde Sukeforth on Opening Day 1947

While baseball today celebrates the 77th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the major leagues’ color barrier, few remember Robinson's manager with the Brooklyn Dodgers in that historic debut is Clyde Sukeforth – the scout largely responsible for bringing the infielder from the Negro Leagues to Brooklyn.

After scouting Robinson for Dodgers team president Branch Rickey, Sukeforth joins Brooklyn's coaching staff in advance of Robinson’s debut there on April l5, 1947.

Sukeforth, though, quickly finds himself becoming the Dodgers’ interim manager when the pugnacious Leo Durocher is suspended by commissioner Happy Chandler for "conduct detrimental to baseball" and for, well, just being Leo Durocher.

“I was just the right person at the right place at the right time,” Sukeforth later says of being Robinson’s first manager in the majors.

Sukeforth, then 45, wins his first two games as Brooklyn's manager and steps down, leaving another longtime scout, Burt Shotton, to lead the Dodgers for the rest of their pennant-winning season in 1947.

Pee Wee Reese turning a double play with Jackie Robinson

After leaving the dugout, Sukeforth, like everyone else, sits back and watches as Robinson puts together a Hall of Fame career with the Dodgers, a career that runs from 1947-56 with a first-ballot election to Cooperstown coming just five years after Robinson’s retirement.

“Many people have the impression that I was the first man to scout Jackie Robinson, but everybody in America knew what talent he had,” Sukeforth says. “Nobody but Branch Rickey deserves any credit. They have given me too much credit.”

Exactly 50 years to the day of Robinson’s Dodgers debut in 1947, baseball commissioner Bud Selig announces Robinson’s No. 42 will be retired by all teams.

“Thinking about the things that happened, I don't know any other ballplayer who could have done what he did,” Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese later says of Robinson and the verbal abuse he watches his teammate endure during his career.

“To be able to hit with everybody yelling at him. He had to block all that out, block out everything but this ball that is coming in at a hundred miles an hour,” Reese says. “To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I’ve ever seen in sports.”