Doug Glanville, ESPN broadcaster and former MLB player, still feels legacy of Jackie Robinson

LOS ANGELES – The baseball world had it sights on Doug Glanville, but Glanville had his sights on Rachel Robinson.

The former major leaguer and current ESPN analyst was 20 years old when he met Jackie Robinson’s widow, and it was as if history and legacy had jumped off the page. At that point, Glanville was getting plenty of attention around baseball, and was projected to go high in the 1991 draft – one of the reasons he and the Robinsons were able to intersect.

“My breath was taken away just meeting her,” Glanville told Newsday Tuesday. “Not long prior, I had read this book about the family legacy (of) Jackie Robinson. It was fresh enough for me to be like, ‘I know exactly who that is.’ It does wonders for you because I know that in that moment, I didn’t take for granted that (there are) all these pioneers that came before you and had these very difficult trials and tribulations just to get the door open.”

Robinson was the reason Glanville could play baseball, yes. But Robinson’s lifelong fight for civil rights and his exceptional ability to break barriers of all kinds resonated with Glanville, who also accomplished a “first” of his own – being the first Ivy League-educated Black man to play in the majors.

On Wednesday, when all of baseball observes Jackie Robinson Day, Glanville will be part of the celebrations – and the Mets-Dodgers broadcast. Glanville will be voicing his essay on Robinson’s legacy on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, and be part of the pregame show from Dodger Stadium. Joe Buck will get the call and be joined in the booth by Ron Darling and Orel Hersheiser.

As they have since 2009, all players around baseball will wear No. 42 in honor of Robinson. The Mets-Dodgers matchup is especially apt.

The Mets – the National League successor to the Brooklyn Dodgers – will play the current iteration of Robinson’s team not far from where Robinson grew up. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts is one of only three black managers in baseball – something Robinson said he wanted to see more of when he gave his final public speech during the 1972 World Series.

At Citi Field, the rotunda is dedicated to Robinson, and the visitor’s clubhouse at Dodger Stadium has a wall decal honoring Robinson. Both have the same quote: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

Robinson’s contributions go even beyond that, manager Carlos Mendoza said.

“It’s a special day, especially for me as a Latino,” Mendoza said. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. The fact that we get to celebrate here at Dodger Stadium – I’m looking forward to the festivities and all the pregame ceremonies. You talk about dealing with pressure at this level (but) imagine what he dealt with – all the pressure he dealt with back in the day.”

For Glanville, it’s highly personal. He developed strong ties to the Robinson family throughout the years. He worked extensively with Jackie’s daughter, Sharon, on afterschool programs. He spent the first ever Jackie Robinson Day – held in 2004 – in uniform with the Phillies. That was his last season in major-league baseball.

“I would see it as an honor to try find different ways to try and capture his impact but also to remember and to also think about, ‘How do we keep remembering?’ ” Glanville said. “That’s the challenge with time because you keep moving and I think there are moments where maybe society declares or maybe you want to believe, ‘OK, we’ve moved past this. We’re in this post-Jackie era where we’re living out the things that he set out to do but then you see that we have so much more work to do.”

That’s why Glanville’s essay takes special care to honor Robinson’s family, who have made it a life mission to extend his legacy. He speaks about his own ties to the player, but also the greater virtues he embodied. And another message is clear: The work isn’t done yet.

“I think that’s always a challenge of marrying the remembering (of his legacy) with not losing the optimism, because you’re not exactly where you want to be,” Glanville said. “If Jackie was here today, you think you’d call out all kinds of things. He’d say, no, we still have to work on these things for equality.”

And equality was the key for Robinson, Glanville noted.

“He believed in those universal principles that, even though it’s seen through the lens of black struggle, it was still about everybody – equality was about everybody,” Glanville said. “It was always about, we all deserve this.”

An earlier version of this story incorrectly detailed part of Glanville's work with Rachel Robinson.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.