The Dodgers Whiff at the White House
And, the Philadelphia A's pitcher who survived a World War II prison camp
Pregame Pepper
. . . Jackie Robinson’s final post-baseball business enterprise involved forming a company that used black capital and integrated work teams to build affordable housing.
. . . Rachel Robinson, a registered nurse with a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing, eventually became an assistant professor of nursing at Yale School of Nursing and the nursing director at the Connecticut Mental Health Center.
Leading Off
The Great White House Whiff
Instead of delivering a powerful message about the DoD’s Jackie Robinson diss, the Dodgers swung and missed.
By Jeff Kallman
I hoped against hope, well on the record, that if the Dodgers absolutely had to visit the Trump White House, as they did Monday, they would deliver a subtle message that they didn’t take kindly to the Defense Department’s hammy, clammy bid at scrubbing the story of Jackie Robinson’s military career from its “Sports Heroes Who Served” Web pages.
Maybe I’d have done better to hope for seeing my driveway occupied by a frame-up-fully restored 1947 Cadillac. The car presented to Robinson and his wife, Rachel, on Jackie Robinson Day at Ebbets Field, 23 September. “I’m sixty-nine years old,” dance legend Bill (Bojangles) Robinson told the packed bandbox, “but never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d stand face-to-face with Ty Cobb in Technicolour.”
I should have feared going in that Dodger manager Dave Roberts meant it, when he told a reporter that there would be nothing political on the team’s side, visiting with a president to whom the very thing for which the Dodgers have stood more powerfully than they stand for competitive, winning major league baseball—the game’s welcoming of anyone and everyone, from anywhere and everywhere—is buncombe.
“We have a lot of different people that are part of this organization,” said the manager, whom Mr. Trump might consider just another suppressable black if his work clothing wasn’t a Dodger uniform.
Different backgrounds, different cultures, race, gender. So everyone had a different story. Economic situations. So we are all going as an organization. I do know that we’re all aligned, and everyone’s going to have their opinions. This is not a political thing, and I’m not going to sit up here and make it political. I’m excited to, again, recognize the 2024 World Series champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Today’s White House is the (non-consecutive) second-time home of a man who believes (one hesitates saying “thinks” in the same sentence as this un-thinking president) that most men and women of non-white biology could only have attained their jobs if not their life’s stations by way of formal D[iversity]E[quity]I[nclusion] policy.
I took a cue from Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, who urged the Dodgers to turn up at the White House wearing team jerseys with Robinson’s number 42. After more or less admitting that wanting to see that was a pleasant daydream at most, I went on to suggest the Dodgers—who weren’t likely to show the courage Arellano urged—should at least present Mr. Trump with a Dodger uniforn No. 42.
“Hand it to him,” I wrote, “and say nothing. Then—before they lend or spend any further credibility upon a man who rejects that for which the Dodgers have stood, since Jackie Robinson stepped onto a field to begin the Dodger career that launched a powerful rebuke to formal segregation and Robinson himself into Cooperstown and world immortality—Roberts and his players should get the hell out.”
The organisation that had the guts to stand athwart their game’s segregation, yelling “Stop,” now lacked the heart to make even that small gesture that would have said at least as many volumes as Robinson’s very career said, from beating a race-based Army court martial all the way to Cooperstown and beyond.
“[A]t the end of the day,” said future Hall of Fame pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who’d handed Mr. Trump a Dodger jersey with number 47 (his current position in the procession of American presidents), “getting to go to the White House, getting to see the Oval Office, getting to meet the President of the United States, that’s stuff that you can’t lose sight of no matter what you believe.”
You can’t lose sight, either, of a president enough of whose utterances and acts betray him as a man over whom Jackie Robinson and his teammates, from their honoured eternal seats in the Elysian Fields, would fume, not fawn.
Jeff Kallman edits the Wednesday and Thursday editions of Here’s the Pitch. He writes Throneberry Fields Forever. You can reach him at easyace1955@gmail.com.
Cleaning Up
Phil Marchildon, Ace Pitcher and POW
He went from Philadelphia A’s ace to Stalag List 111 in World War II—and survived.
By Russ Walsh
The list of major league baseball players who saw World War II combat is long and distinguished. It includes Hall of Fame players like Bob Feller, Yogi Berra, Warren Spahn and lesser lights like Jocko Thompson, Al Brancato, and Dick Whitman. All these players sacrificed a significant chunk of their playing careers to fighting for freedom and democracy.
Among the players who fought in the war was the ace pitcher of the Philadelphia Athletics, who traded in his glove to become an ace tail gunner for the Royal Canadian Air Force, Phil Marchildon (MAR-shill-dun).
Perhaps you never heard of him. His obscurity is due in part to pitching for Connie Mack’s lowly As, but also in part to the three prime pitching years he lost to the war, plus untold other good years he lost to the war’s impact upon his physical and mental health.
Marchildon was born October 25, 1913, in Penetanguishene, Ontario, on the banks of the Georgian Bay, about 100 miles due north of Toronto. He had no exposure to baseball until high school, but he showed a strong arm and became a pitcher for the town team, though he had little control.
Needing steady employment during the Great Depression, Marchildon took a job in the nearby Creighton Nickel Mines, and played baseball for the company team. He remained a miner and part-time pitcher there until 1938, when a former coach helped get him a tryout with the minor league Toronto Maple Leafs.
His superior fastball (he struck out 275 batters in 25 games for the Creighton team) impressed the Blue Jays enough to sign him to a professional contract. He was 25 years old. In 1940, the Philadelphia Athletics purchased his contract and brought him to Philadelphia at the end of the 1940 season.
Pitching coach Earl Brucker straightened out Marchildon’s mechanics, which helped him improve his always shaky control. By 1941, he was a part of the As rotation, going 10-15, with a 3.57 ERA in 204+ innings. As a 27-year-old rookie, he was the best pitcher the 64-90 Athletics team had. He established his ace status in the rotation firmly the following year, going 17-14, 4.20 as the team went 55-99.
After the 1942 season, Marchildon enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He trained as an aerial gunner and was shipped overseas, stationed in Bournemouth in the south of England. On his 26th mission, on August 17, 1944, just four missions from earning eligibility to return home, Marchildon’s plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea.
Marchildon and the plane’s navigator escaped and parachuted into the icy water. Threatened by death from hyperthermia, the two were rescued by a Dutch fishing boat but turned over to the German authorities. Marchildon spent the next several months in the notorious Stalag Luft 111 in Sagan (now Zagan, Poland), the home of 10,000 prisoners of war made famous by the film The Great Escape. Marchildon played outfield on the prison camp’s softball team.
By January 1945, with the Russian troops advancing on the stalag, the German’s moved their captives on a forced march to Bremen. They forced the prisoners to move again when Allied forces advanced from the western flank. Many prisoners died from malnutrition and frostbite on this infamous Death March. Marchildon himself lost 30 pounds and was severely malnourished.
“We were sleeping in a field, when I woke up suddenly and heard troops passing,” he once said. “I thought they were Germans but learned the next day that the British had us surrounded.” Thus liberated, Marchildon was flown to England to recuperate and then to Canada by boat. “When I came home, my nerves came all loose. First night home, I took my blankets out into the yard and slept on the ground. Couldn’t sleep in a bed.”
Connie Mack talked Marchildon into coming back to the A’s right away. He met the club in Chicago on July 6, 1945. Sportswriter Red Smith described his condition this way: “A new nervousness of speech and gesture suggests something of what he went through.” The carefree Marchildon of pre-war days was nowhere in evidence.
The A’s held Phil Marchildon Night at Shibe Park on August 29, 1945. The crowd of 20,000 saw him throw five innings of two-hit baseball, despite his clearly weakened condition. The As won, 2-1. But Marchildon reported that he found it difficult to focus on baseball. “I’d kind of drift away from concentration. I’d think about how lucky I was to get out of it at all.”
Marchildon seemed to return to full strength in 1946. He won 13 and lost 16 as the As finished in the cellar once again. But he was better in 1947, going 19-9 as the As vaulted to a surprising fifth place finish.
The A’s were even better in 1948, but Marchildon wasn’t. After a good start to the season, he began to experience dizzy spells and general aches and pains and physical weakness. He was diagnosed with a recurrence of the dysentery he had experienced as a prisoner of war, but what we would now call his post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) went undiagnosed.
Marchildon went 9-15 in 1948. He appeared in just seven games in 1949. At the end of spring training 1950, he was sold to a minor league club. He caught on with the Boston Braves but appeared in only one game with them. He pitched for the minor league Toronto Blue Jays in 1951 and was released at the end of the season.
He had a hard time adjusting to life after baseball. Depressed and drinking too much, his friends eventually helped him get his life back together. He worked for Dominion Metal Wear Industries until his retirement at age 65. An avid skier, he spent time on the ski slopes near his home.
In 1976, Phil Marchildon was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. He died in 1997 at the age of 83, leaving behind two daughters and three grandchildren.
Marchildon was a fine pitcher. His career got a late start, was interrupted by war, and further shortened by the aftereffects of his war experience. He finished his career with a 68-75 record, but that mediocre record is no measure of the quality of the pitcher or the mettle of the man.
Notes
In addition to the references listed below the author consulted Baseball Reference and Retrosheet.
References
Bedingfield, Gary, Baseball in Wartime. BIW—Phil Marchildon retrieved on April 5, 2025.
Berger, Ralph. SABR Biography of Phil Marchildon—Society for American Baseball Research, retrieved on March 4, 2025.
Russ Walsh is a retired teacher, baseball coach, and writer living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He is a lifelong and long-suffering Philadelphia Phillies fan. He writes for the Society for American Baseball Research and for his blog The Faith of a Phillies Fan. You can contact him through BlueSky @russ47.bsky.social.
Extra Innings: He Said It, We Didn’t . . .
Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others—we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like every other American who has worn the uniform.
—John Ullyot, Pentagon Press Secretary, hastening to walk it back as the backlash ramped up against the takedowns of the Robinson, Code Talkers, Tuskegee Airmen, and Marine Ira Hayes pages.
The Final Out
Octavio Dotel, 51, RIP—The righthanded relief pitcher, whose career included stops with thirteen teams from the Mets (his first) to the Tigers (his last), died as a result of the Jet Set nightclub tragedy in the Dominican Republic.
The Santo Domingo club’s roof collapsed early Tuesday during a merengue concert by Rubby Perez, killing 58 people—including Dotel, former Nationals first baseman Tony Blanco, and Nelsy Cruz, the sister of former seven-time All-Star slugger Nelson Cruz. The cause of the collapse is under investigation.
Dotel’s fifteen-season career included four with the Astros that featured him as 2004’s successor closer to Hall of Famer Billy Wagner. He also helped the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals toward a World Series championship. Rescuers pulled him out alive from the Jet Set collapse, but published reports indicated he died while being transported to a hospital.
Blanco played 56 games for the 2005 Nationals before returning to the minor leagues and, from 2009-2016, playing in Nippon Professional Baseball leagues.
Here’s the Pitch offers prayers and condolences to Dotel’s, Blanco’s, Cruz’s, and all families who lost loved ones in this tragedy.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles the Monday issue with Dan Freedman [dfreedman@lionsgate.com] editing Tuesday and Jeff Kallman [easyace1955@gmail.com] at the helm Wednesday and Thursday. Original editor Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com], does the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Former editor Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] is now co-director [with Benjamin Chase and Jonathan Becker] of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, which publishes this newsletter and the annual ACTA book of the same name. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HtP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.