Robinson Helped the Dream Come True

Former Dodger great Don Newcombe, speaking at a ceremony Thursday at the Coliseum in which a bronze plaque was unveiled in Jackie Robinson’s honor, recalled a dinner conversation he shared with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. one month before the civil rights leader was slain in 1968.

“He said to me, ‘Don, you, Jackie and Roy [Campanella] will never know how easy it made it for me to do my job with what you guys did in baseball,’ ” Newcombe said.

“Imagine that. In 1968, when Martin was being beaten over the head with billy clubs and thrown in jail and bitten by dogs, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe made his job easier.

“My God, how hard would his job have been if it wasn’t for us three?”

More Robinson: Before delivering his emotionally charged address, Newcombe said, he sought inspiration from Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

“I looked up at the sky and I said, ‘Jackie, what am I going to talk about today? What would you like me to say?’ ” Newcombe said. “And Jackie says, ‘You never asked me before what you were going to say, so you might as well say what you want to say.’ ”

Trivia time: Shortstop Cesar Izturis and center fielder Milton Bradley were the only two players on the Dodgers’ opening-day rosters in both of the last two seasons. Which player has had the most opening-day starts for the team since it moved to Los Angeles?

Paving the way: Dodger broadcaster Tommy Hawkins said that when Robinson signed with the Dodgers, Hawkins’ mother gathered all the children in the neighborhood, including her 8-year-old son, and asked them: “Do you know what this is going to mean to you later in your life?”

Hawkins, who is black, said that when he later attended Notre Dame he “knew what it meant because I knew that Jackie had opened that door.”

Timeless contribution: Coliseum Commissioner Zev Yaroslavsky, speaking about Robinson’s legacy, said the pioneer would “speak to us for generations to come, to every individual, every American, every human being who wants to break some barrier, some glass ceiling, some racial taboo.”

Heavenly idea: The Lake Elsinore Storm, the Class-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres, recently announced in a tongue-in-cheek news release that it had changed its name to the Anaheim/Los Angeles/San Diego Storm of Lake Elsinore.

“We figured since the Angels abandoned Anaheim that we’d stake claim to that area and beyond,” Storm President and General Manager Dave Oster said in a prepared statement. “With our location the boundaries are endless. We are an hour from anywhere.

“The bottom line, we just want to make more money.”

Trivia answer: Center fielder Willie Davis made 12 opening-day starts for the Dodgers.

And finally: Sports Illustrated’s Bill Scheft wrote that all Angel home games this season will start 15 seconds later “so the P.A. announcer can get in the full name of the team.”