Rickey told another reporter: “I know this boy has the physical equipment to help this club. The only question is whether he will be able to withstand the tremendous pressure under which he will work. His problem is greater than Robinson’s — all eyes are on the pitcher.”

In his first Dodgers appearance, on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 1947, against the Pirates at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Bankhead produced a home run, but the pitching for which Rickey had hired him was not stellar. “In a word, it was awful,” wrote Joseph M. Sheehan in The Times the next day, adding that the new Dodger was “obviously nervous.”

“I was scared as hell,” Bankhead later recalled. “When I stepped on the mound, I was perspiring all over and tight as a drum.” His first pitch, a fastball, banged the Pirates batter Wally Westlake hard on the elbow.

Although the Dodgers made it to the 1947 Series, Bankhead never truly found his footing. In that seven-game series, which the Yankees won, he pinch-ran but did not pitch. After it was over, an Associated Press sportswriter called Bankhead a “flash in the pan” and acerbically recalled how some had called him a “gift to baseball.”

The following spring, Rickey sent Bankhead to the minors, where he stayed for two years before returning in 1950 for a farewell season and a half on the Dodgers. Giving up on major league baseball, and struggling with an old arm injury, he crossed the border to play for 15 years for the Mexican League.

Almost broke, his private life complicated by relationships with sundry women — he was “facing inner turmoil” and “trying to get back on his feet,” so one friend recalled — he settled in Houston, trying to support himself and his wife by delivering groceries, often while smoking a cigarette. In 1976, the day before he would have turned 56, Bankhead died in a Veterans Administration hospital of lung cancer.

Some of those few who have written about Bankhead have argued that he lacked the kind of technical skills that might have allowed him to have the kind of career that Robinson enjoyed. But a better explanation might be temperament. Rickey had insisted that he sought out Robinson to be the first African-American in modern major league baseball as much for his even, resilient disposition as for his abilities on the diamond.