Via the Wall Street Journal, commentary on how one of baseball’s favorite stories about overcoming prejudice didn’t happen the way many fans would like to think:

There may be no crying in baseball, as the manager played by Tom Hanks declares in an iconic moment in the movie “A League of Their Own,” but there is, occasionally, hugging.

Babe Ruth hugged Lou Gehrig in 1939 when the terminally ill Gehrig said goodbye to fans at Yankee Stadium. Yogi Berra hugged Don Larson after Larson threw a perfect game in the 1956 World Series. And last week in Texas, a baseball hug went viral when a little-league batter got hit in the head with a pitch and hugged the distraught young man who had thrown the ball.

But the most famous and important hug in the history of the game is the one that didn’t happen—or at least didn’t happen the way so many people would like to think it did.

On May 13, 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Cincinnati Reds at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Jackie Robinson, major-league baseball’s first Black player of the modern era, had made his debut with the Dodgers less than a month earlier, and he had not been greeted warmly. His own teammates petitioned management, saying they would rather be traded than play with a Black man. Opponents threatened to boycott. Pitches were thrown intentionally at his head. Death threats arrived by mail.

But a turning point came in Cincinnati, according to lore. As Robinson faced vile taunts from members of the Reds and their white fans, the story goes, Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese, a white man from Kentucky, walked across the field and put an arm around his Black teammate, a simple gesture of brotherhood that hushed the crowd and sent a message across baseball and the nation.

It’s a beautiful story, one that’s been repeated many times in news stories, documentaries and sermons. It forms the centerpiece of a children’s book called “The Teammates.” It provides one of the most powerful scenes in “42,” the most recent movie about Robinson’s life. There’s even a statue in Brooklyn depicting the embrace. But repetition doesn’t change the fact that the story is probably bunk.

No newspapers reported the event at the time. In fact, the New York Post said Robinson had been “the toast of the town” in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Post reported the day after the game: “If anyone had any objection to Jackie’s presence on the field, he failed to make himself heard.” Writing in his weekly newspaper column, Robinson called his visit to Crosley Field “a nice experience.”

The story of the Cincinnati embrace surfaced decades later in an interview with one of Robinson’s teammates, pitcher Rex Barney. But Barney got one of the key details wrong. He said he was warming up to pitch in the first inning of the game when Reese shut down the hecklers. The fact is, Barney didn’t pitch that day until the seventh inning.

In interviews I conducted with Robinson’s wife, Rachel, for my book on his breakthrough season, she insisted that no such hug occurred in 1947. In subsequent years, after Jackie Robinson had proven his abilities and secured his place on the team, he and Reese became friends. They often stood together on the diamond and chatted amiably. Robinson would later recall a moment when Reese did step across the field to offer an embrace and hush an abusive crowd, but he placed the incident in 1948 in Boston.

I prefer to stick to the known facts.

Robinson the rookie was a man on a tightrope. One slip, one mistake, one bad slump, one serious injury, one outburst of rage in the face of racist taunts, and he likely would have been gone. Baseball’s so-called Great Experiment would have been its Brief Experiment.

Rachel Robinson took pains to make me understand this when we spoke. She and Jack (as she always called him) were so uncertain about their future in 1947, she said, that they didn’t even rent an apartment in New York. Instead, they sublet a room in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, without their own bathroom or kitchen.

Robinson’s teammates, for the most part, did not take a stand on his behalf. The Dodger wives, too, kept their distance from Rachel. Why stick out their necks for a player who might soon be gone?

But Robinson persevered. He dodged the pitches thrown at his head. He hit well and dazzled with his bold base-running. He used his newspaper column, which ran exclusively in Black newspapers, to share his thoughts with fans, telling a story of self-reliance and courage that the white press largely missed.

Gradually, he earned the respect of many of his teammates and rivals that year, especially when he helped lead the Dodgers to the World Series and the financial bonus that came with that success. But he was under no illusions. “They hadn’t changed because they liked me any better,” he wrote, referring to his teammates. “They had changed because I could help fill their wallets.”

That’s why, as Rachel Robinson said, the erroneous story of the Reese-Robinson hug does a disservice. It credits Reese for helping to ease Jackie Robinson’s way. It credits the white establishment with benevolence it didn’t earn. And it diminishes our appreciation of Robinson’s true strength.

The little-league batter who hugged the pitcher in Texas last week acted on instinct, out of love, out of compassion. Jackie Robinson could have used that kind of gesture. But he proved he didn’t need it.