Like Jackie Robinson before him, Elston Howard was a baseball pioneer whose impact went well beyond breaking racial barriers.
Major League Baseball celebrated the life and times of Jackie Robinson on Friday, as they do every year on the anniversary of his breaking baseball's unofficial color barrier in 1947. Almost eight years to the day after that monumental achievement for Robinson, the Yankees finally employed the first black player in franchise history. Elston Howard's name would go down in history no matter what he did from that point on, but his impact on the Yankees went well beyond that singular moment.