Al Gunn waited his turn. The first guy to throw out a first pitch last Wednesday at NBT Bank Stadium was Randall Bennett, of the Syracuse Brigadiers Alumni Association, followed by 10-year-old Michael Baranov, representing HP Hood dairy products and six other businesses.
The closer, a magnificent choice, was Al Gunn.
It was a warm and gentle night — wisps of fast-moving clouds in a blue sky — within an extraordinarily beautiful week of April weather in Syracuse. Gunn, 84, walked toward the mound and took it all in. The Syracuse Mets were about to play the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders in an International League game, before a small gathering of evening onlookers sprinkled among the roughly 11,000 seats of the stadium.
Those who were there for the moment lucked out.
On Jackie Robinson Day in pro baseball, with the memory of a nation-changing pioneer being celebrated in ballparks coast-to-coast, this is a guarantee:
It is hard to believe there was any honorary event on that day, anywhere, that could have possibly meant more than Al Gunn throwing out the first pitch in Syracuse.
His close friend, Sebastian Moore — assistant director of the Syracuse Inner-City Little League — put his arm around Gunn as they walked onto the field, both men appreciating the meaning of every step.
“Remember where he came from,” Moore said. “He keeps a lot of it in, but he’s told me some stories. For him? To do that? In a stadium that to him might as well be the big leagues?
“It means the world to him,” Moore said.
Alongside his players, Gunn simply said:
“Praise the Lord.”
Three words, and his voice cracked from emotion before he finished.
Otis Jennings, the Syracuse Mets team chaplain and a former Syracuse parks commissioner, joined the little group that gathered for a ceremony on the diamond. Jennings, who wore a Brooklyn Dodgers jacket that carried Robinson’s number 42, explained the context to the crowd, how Robinson weathered unfathomable abuse in 1947 to shatter racial barriers that had kept Major League Baseball all-white since the 1880s.
The last Black player before Robinson to set foot in the majors — and, for that matter, in the International League?
Moses Fleetwood Walker, whose final taste of professional baseball was in 1889, in Syracuse.
Robinson’s courage was one of the ignition points in the great post-World War II push by Black Americans for civil rights, and Syracuse has both a painful and intimate role in the story.
Eighty years ago this month, Robinson’s journey to the majors began with the Montreal Royals in the International League. Many of the Syracuse Chiefs of that time — regular opponents of the Royals — were virulent racists who heaped vile abuse on him throughout that season, as Robinson himself recalled.
Yet that Syracuse team eventually left town in the 1950s, leaving the community without Triple A minor league baseball. Sixty-six years ago, when the Royals needed a new home, the Montreal franchise shifted to Syracuse — so the Mets club that plays now at NBT is actually the 21st century manifestation of Robinson’s historic International League team.
As Moore emphasized, none of that heritage is lost on Al Gunn, born in 1942 in the heart of suffocating racial restrictions in Alabama. Gunn grew up loving baseball, but Black children in his community were forbidden to set foot on the landscaped diamonds of civic parks. Gunn and his friends had to play in cow pastures, beyond the edge of town.
Once Gunn grew a little older, he often visited the home of a neighbor on his block who had a television, giving the child a chance to watch Robinson play for the Dodgers. It was electrifying, he recalls. Even then, as a kid, Gunn understood:
“Jackie, Dr. King, don’t forget Rosa Parks,” Gunn said with reverence at the ballpark. Of such American giants, he said:
“They kept us going.”
Eventually, Gunn moved to Syracuse — both for better job opportunities and to get out from under the boot of Jim Crow cruelty. He worked at General Motors while he and his late wife Mary raised their children. In whatever free time he found, Gunn joined another baseball true believer, the late Avery Brooks, in teaching a game that for them was a statement of faith and joy to children in the heart of the city.
Gunn would later found the Inner-City Little League, which is still rolling. Twenty years ago, he was signing up children at a table in the Southwest Community Center when he met Moore — a now-retired substance abuse counselor raised in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood — who has been a stalwart of the effort ever since. Wednesday, Moore — who accompanied Gunn and many of their young players to the stadium — explained how teaching the game begins with the simplest of lessons:
Get your butt down, he tells the children, once they take the field. Play the ball. Don’t let the ball play you.
They do those drills again and again — hopefully until the kids catch on — and then they sit around picnic tables or wherever they can settle in and they share some food and Gunn and Moore talk about everything with their players, about God and life and possibility.
“What they do for me,” Moore said of the kids, “is more than what I could ever do for them.”
On the big day at NBT, Gunn and Moore and a handful of players arrived early and assembled in the parking lot, before they headed as a group toward their seats — magnificent seats — along the first base line. They were invited to Jackie Robinson Day by Mets general manager Jason Smorol, who — when asked why he made that choice — flashed an are you-kidding-me smile and exclaimed, with emphasis:
“It’s Al Gunn!”
The kids, as part of the buildup to the first pitch, had the chance to run out onto the field and raise a banner carrying the name of their league. They lined up just above the Mets dugout while the Syracuse players — guys on the absolute brink of the majors — cheerfully signed some baseballs. In a nearby stadium aisle, a young man walking past the celebration stopped in sudden joyous recognition:
“Coach Gunn!” said Darnell Pratt, 39. He is in academy training to become a Syracuse firefighter, and he was at the game with one of his children, Darnell Jr. He responded to Gunn with warmth and gratitude, recalling just how much the coach meant during Pratt’s childhood.
“I was a young kid straight out of the Cherry Hill projects,” Pratt said. Gunn would show up with his van to drive Pratt and his friends to their Little League practices and games. Pratt is now teaching what he learned about baseball to his own children, and it made his night to not only see that Gunn is still going strong, but that he was honored as a lifetime emissary of what Jackie Robinson meant and achieved.
“God is good,” said Gunn, who — in the way of so many greats — promptly rose to the moment, on the field.
Moore, his close friend, said it is difficult to fully explain how this opportunity resonated for Gunn. As an African-American child in the 1940s and 1950s, Gunn was barred — at risk of violence — from even walking onto a diamond used by white children.
Eighty years later, at a game honoring the player he reveres above all others, Al Gunn stepped toward the mound from the manicured grass of a ballpark that hosts a team at the absolute top tier of the minors. Never in his life, Gunn said, had he been asked to throw out a first pitch. He wore a Negro Leagues cap and jersey — a choice made to honor generations of great players who faced impossible barriers, before Robinson — and he paused to look at the catcher’s mitt for a moment, before he released the ball.
Gunn hurled a knee-high strike to Mets bat boy Connor Hayden, who was catching.
The fans, seeing an 84-year-old deliver like that, offered a little roar that rolled around the stadium. Hayden reached over and handed Gunn the ball. As the elated coach walked off the field, the old ballplayer instincts kicked in and he skipped over the baseline for good luck, not wanting to take any chances about fate on this night of nights.
Moore, of everyone there, knew just what this meant.
“For him?” Moore said. “When he goes home, this will let him sleep.”
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
Sean Kirst: On Jackie Robinson Day at NBT stadium, perfect choice for the first pitch
For Al Gunn, a Syracuse youth baseball coach who endured the same conditions Robinson took on and shattered, a moment that meant everything.
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