Ron Gersbacher was maybe 15 when his Northside Wildcats of the old Kiwanis League qualified in 1962 to play for a local junior baseball championship. Syracuse city recreation director Nicoletta Urciuoli told the players she could offer them some special jerseys, which Gersbacher remembers were stored in an old trunk:
They were the “away” jerseys for the famous Montreal Royals.
Gersbacher was a teenager. It was long before he became a well-known historian of baseball heritage in Syracuse. Yet those jerseys were evidence of an extraordinary connection between this city and baseball history, a little-known fact tying our community to events that changed not only the game but rippled into every aspect of this nation.
Eighty years ago this April, Jackie Robinson became the first Black player since the 19th century to compete in the International League, one of baseball’s top minor leagues. It was his stepping stone toward the groundbreaking moment a year later when Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, shattering long-established racial barriers in Major League Baseball.
The legendary International League team he joined in 1946 was Montreal.
That franchise survives in 2026 — as the Syracuse Mets.
Those extra jerseys were available roughly 64 years ago to Gersbacher’s team because the Royals had brought along some of their old gear when they relocated to this city’s North Side, only a year or two earlier.
In that sense, when the Mets celebrate baseball’s annual Jackie Robinson Day on April 15 at NBT Bank Stadium – not so far away now, with spring training well underway – Syracuse will hold a particularly intimate spot in a profound anniversary.
“You don’t have 1947 if there’s no 1946,” said baseball author and historian Chris Lamb, who wrote a book based on what Robinson faced and overcame during his spring training with the Royals in a then-legally segregated Florida, just before his landmark season 80 years ago in the International League.
A decade later, Robinson retired from the game when the Dodgers tried to trade him to the then-crosstown New York Giants, after the 1956 season. The dwindling number of Americans who can actually remember the era when Robinson played baseball are now well into their 80s or their late 70s — meaning they represent less than 5 percent of the nation’s population.
For some elders in the Syracuse Black community — understanding what Robinson endured, and what he helped transform — the April remembrance demands particular attention because of what they lived and witnessed…
And what they fear, more than ever, is too easily forgotten.
“He means everything to me,” said Al Gunn, 85, founder of the Inner City Little League in Syracuse, speaking of why he makes a point of thinking of Robinson, every day.
“He gave us a break so we could get somewhere,” said Al Hayden, 90, who helped out for years while a close friend who also revered Robinson — the late Avery Brooks — developed the Syracuse Youth Outreach Enrichment Program. Brooks created it behind a dream of bringing baseball to city children, whom he believed were all often shut out of existing baseball leagues or travel ball.
Gunn, Brooks and Hayden all grew up in the American South under suffocating Jim Crow laws. Gunn said Black children were not allowed to set foot in the public parks of his Alabama hometown. If you wanted to play baseball, Gunn said, you did it in a “cow pasture” on the outskirts.
In late 1945, when Gunn was 4, Robinson signed a contract with the Royals. In the following spring, he became the first Black player in the IL or its earlier incarnations since Moses Fleetwood Walker competed for the Syracuse Stars in 1889 — a last glimmer of 19th century hope before the highest professional executives in “white” baseball finalized a “gentleman’s agreement” banning all Black players from their ranks.
“He made the way for us,” Gunn said of Robinson, with deep emotion. Gunn keeps Robinson’s image on his computer screen. He sees it multiple times every day, and he wants his young players to understand: That portrait is intended as both an expression of gratitude and a means of inspiration.
What Robinson did “helped change the world” and must be remembered, said Geneva Hayden, Al Hayden’s wife and a legendary champion of childhood literacy in Syracuse. She and her peers all witnessed the kind of cruelty Robinson withstood, illustrated specifically through a harsher side of baseball heritage in this city.
By Robinson’s own testimony and the recollections of others close to his journey, the old Syracuse Chiefs — the franchise that left town six years before the Royals relocated here, in 1961 — responded to Robinson with as much poison and hatred as any team in the International League.
In 1946, the Montreal Gazette reported that Royals general manager Mel Jones angrily confronted Syracuse baseball president Leo Miller with these words: “(Robinson) had to take a worse ride from your club than any other. Somebody in your dugout has been yelling at your pitchers to throw at him almost every time he comes up.”
The late Garton Del Savio, a Chiefs player in 1946 who knew and respected Robinson, told me years ago how his teammates routinely hurled vicious insults at Robinson, which Del Savio described as the “worst things” you can scream at another man. He remembered how some of those Chiefs wanted to take the field in “black face” to harass Robinson, and had to be talked down.
Robinson himself recalled how someone from the Chiefs once threw a black cat onto the field, as a taunt. Local sportswriters expressed crude hostility. Robinson pushed through it. Despite the wear on his own health and nerves, his overall response illustrates why he ended up with a plaque in Cooperstown, years later: Robinson hit .349 for the season and won the IL batting title. The Royals defeated Syracuse in the championship series, before going on to win the “Little World Series.”
Robinson, named the league’s Most Valuable Player, made his first Royals visit to Syracuse in April 1946 and consistently played well all season long, against the Chiefs — including a stunning-and-emblematically-Robinson-at-bat when he put down a bunt at such an unexpected moment that the panicked Chiefs threw the ball away, and he ended up coming all the way around to score.
His major league breakthrough in 1947, with the Dodgers, is a matter of global renown. Robinson shouldered intense abuse to shatter racist myths and emerge as one of the finest players in the game. As Lamb said, his courage and example were among the igniting factors in the postwar civil rights movement that finally helped topple countless hateful barriers in America.
The time in Montreal — a city that in many ways shielded Robinson and his wife Rachel from the racial animus they so often encountered — was of pivotal importance, said Jack Jedwab, a writer, historian and president of the Association for Canadian Studies and Metropolis Canada who wrote a book about that 1946 season.
Put simply, if Robinson had elected to step away from the threats and utter hatred, the integration of professional baseball might have been set back for years.
All of that history, next month, meets a 2026 crossroads in Syracuse.
The old franchise known as the Chiefs departed for Miami, after the 1955 season. As Gersbacher relates, Syracuse was without International League baseball in the late 1950s, even as the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, leaving Montreal without a major league parent club.
The direct result: The club that used to be the Royals moved to Syracuse and was renamed as the Chiefs, the same team that has evolved over the years into the Syracuse Mets, whose National League parent club in Queens designed its stadium rotunda in Robinson’s honor.
Syracuse, then, is now home to the International League squad on which Robinson began his extraordinary journey – yet was also home 80 years ago to another squad of contradictory history that tried its hardest to break his resolve and drive him from the game.
All of this will wrap together at NBT Bank Stadium on April 15, when the Mets host Scranton/Wilkes-Barre and both clubs take part in the baseball-wide celebration of Jackie Robinson Day, held on April 15 – the date of his 1947 regular-season debut with the Dodgers. Mets General Manager Jason Smorol said the team, as it does each year, will offer a program that includes invitations to many civic groups, youth leagues and other organizations.
He said the Mets also participate in “The Nine,” a minor league initiative named in honor of Robinson’s number with the Royals. The intention is honoring the game’s Black pioneers while building links to communities of color that are too often severed — as Al Gunn and Al Hayden both can testify — from the deeper baseball connections to which Robinson dedicated his life.
Bob Searing, curator of history for the Onondaga Historical Association, said the remembrance provides an extraordinary opportunity for Central New York educators and historians to discuss all elements of the Robinson story. While Searing said accounts of Robinson being harassed in Syracuse make him “sick and sad,” he finds meaning in the idea that today’s Syracuse Mets are the baseball descendant of the revered Montreal team that served as Robinson’s launching pad.
Searing spoke of how Fleet Walker, whose 1884 big-league appearance would be the last by a Black American until Robinson broke through, was acquitted of a racially charged 1891 murder accusation in Syracuse — a verdict that left the community so overjoyed that a frantic judge could not quell the celebration in the courtroom.
To Searing, both tales offer a chance to teach schoolchildren about the long and continuing struggle for racial justice, played out in such a prominent role in our own city — and “the ability of sport to move American culture forward.”
The late Francis McMillan Parks understood that point first-hand. She was a beloved Syracuse University educator, adviser and civic advocate who died 14 months ago, at 87.
She also spent a lifetime admiring and emulating Jackie Robinson.
Her daughter, Stephanie Ellen Parks, said this week that her mother never stopped being intensely appreciative of everything that Robinson sacrificed. As a child, amid hard Jim Crow restrictions in Texas, Francis listened with her grandmother Ellen to radio broadcasts of Robinson’s games with the Dodgers.
For Francis and countless other African-Americans of that era, Stephanie said Robinson offered “permission and hope.” They finally had a living example of someone who could bring down the walls that had meant suffering for countless generations, and Francis Parks lived out that gratitude for the rest of her life.
Mother and daughter often showed up on cold April days in Syracuse for the annual Jackie Robinson celebration at the stadium — an event that will coincide so perfectly this year with the 80th anniversary of Robinson’s International League heroics and struggles.
Jimmy Oliver, a standout baseball player who is now director of community engagement for the Syracuse Police Department, said Robinson’s most enduring qualities went far beyond celestial baseball skills. For girls and boys of the city facing 21st century “adversity and challenges” that can be both daunting and smothering, Oliver said success often equates to one monumentally difficult passage:
Finding a way through it, when everything tells you to stop.
For those children, Oliver said, once they know the full story: “Jackie Robinson’s name still rings the bell.”
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