Why one of college baseball’s top hitters plays with Jackie Robinson’s No. 42 tattooed on his arm

Scott Bandura spent his childhood playing on a predominantly Black baseball team, but that did not make him naive enough to think the Anderson Monarchs were the norm. The team from South Philadelphia often stood out whenever it left its home field behind the rec center at 18th and Fitzwater Streets.

“We would go to these tournaments and see all these other teams, and we were obviously different,” Bandura said.

Even that experience was not enough to prepare Bandura for the lack of players who looked like him as his career climbed.

“It was still a shock when I got to school to see how many teams we come across that don’t even have a single Black player,” said Bandura, a junior outfielder at Princeton who is one of college baseball’s better hitters and could be drafted in July. “It was really eye-opening and made me appreciate the experiences I had growing up even more.”

And that led Bandura a few years ago into a South Street tattoo parlor. He already had the Monarchs crest — “We’re like family,” he said — inked on his shoulder blade. Tattoo No. 2 would have to be just as meaningful. That’s why he asked the artist to leave “42″ — the number Jackie Robinson wore when he broke baseball’s color barrier — on his left forearm.

“I realized no matter where I go to work, whether it’s in baseball or not in baseball, Jackie means so much more than just baseball,” said Bandura, who grew up in Mount Airy. “It was a message that would stick with me no matter where I go for the rest of my life.”

Steve Bandura, Scott’s father, grew up in Mayfair, where it seemed like there was a youth sports program on every corner. He figured that must be how it is everywhere. And then he arrived in 1989 at the Marian Anderson Recreation Center to help a friend launch a boxing program for teens. It didn’t take long for him to realize that not every Philly kid had the same places to play.

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“There was just nothing,” the elder Bandura said.

A few years later, Bandura lost his marketing job in Willow Grove and decided to launch a youth baseball league at the rec center. The 1993 Jackie Robinson Baseball League had 160 first to third graders. Two years later, Bandura took the best kids from his league and formed the Anderson Monarchs, a travel team.

The Monarchs — named after the Negro League team that Robinson played for before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers — traveled around the country on a 1947 bus without air-conditioning and became one of the area’s top programs. The same group of kids played baseball in the spring and summer, soccer in the fall, and basketball in the winter. It’s been that way for nearly 30 years as Bandura has given the kids at Anderson what he had growing up.

“It’s just giving opportunities to kids. That’s what drives me,” said Bandura, who has worked for the Department of Recreation since 1995. “It’s extremely, personally, fulfilling to know that you can open doors for kids and help them realize their potential. I love coaching. I love to see kids’ enthusiasm. I feel like our job is to be doormen. We open the doors for kids. Some of them don’t walk through it, but some of them charge through and take advantage of everything they can. Every kid deserves that opportunity. For every one we have, there’s 1,000 in the city who aren’t getting it.”

Scott Bandura started playing baseball at Anderson when he was 3 years old. He traveled with his buddies to tournaments in Cooperstown, N.Y., Delaware, and South Carolina. They even reached the Little League World Series in 2014 as most of the Taney Dragons also were Anderson Monarchs, including Mo’ne Davis.

But for Scott Bandura, the Monarchs were more than the doubleheaders they played every Saturday and Sunday. The memories he carried with him into that South Street tattoo shop were the images of walking with his teammates across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and sitting in the office of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis as part of a 23-day Civil Rights Barnstorming Tour his father scheduled in 2015.

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“Especially in our formative years, that was huge in creating an identity for ourselves and getting in tune and in touch with history,” Scott Bandura said. “I would argue that kind of stuff was as important, if not more important than the baseball side of things. It was really powerful. You see all the pictures and you see the movies, but all of that stuff still exists. It was almost like a living piece of history. To walk across and see the same landscape as John Lewis saw during that march was really, really powerful.”

The Monarchs traveled to 20 cities in that old bus. They played baseball games along the way but also stopped at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., listened to a member of the Freedom Riders, visited the grave site of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and met Hank Aaron.

And before the trip started, the Monarchs met every Friday night for two months to study Black history for three hours, from slavery to the present day.

“If everyone in this country had that same education, we would have a lot less problems than we do now,” Steve Bandura said. “It’s a lot more ignorance than racism. There’s plenty of racism, but the majority of the problems are just ignorance and a lack of exposure to anyone outside of your little bubble. Some things you don’t understand, and that was me until I was 18 years old.”

Steve Bandura, who is white, did not really leave his Irish Catholic neighborhood until he went to the Community College of Philadelphia and then West Chester University after graduating from Father Judge. His outlook soon started to shift, drastically so when he arrived at Anderson and immersed himself into the neighborhood.

So it was important for Bandura to make sure the Monarchs learned the things he did not. And it was important for him to make sure his son (whose mother, Robin, is Black) knew his history.

“He identifies as Black, which he should because that’s how he’s seen. That’s how he’s going to be judged, basically,” Steve Bandura said. “So it’s extremely important. And it’s extremely important for the white kids who are on the team to understand it as well.

“The thing I love best about every kid on that team is that because of their life experiences and their exposure to so many different environments and people and social classes, every one of those kids is completely comfortable in any situation with any type of people.”

Major League Baseball started this season with the lowest percentage of Black players (6.1) since 1955 and 14 teams (roughly half of MLB) started with either one or zero Black players. Scott Bandura’s professional career — he has received interest from major-league teams ahead of July’s draft — could begin as soon as this summer. If so, it’s safe to expect that he’ll be one of the few Black players on the field as his climb continues.

“It’s a shame that it’s like that with baseball,” Steve Bandura said. “After all these years of MLB programs and The Players’ Alliance and [Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities leagues] and MLB Develops and all that. But no one has yet to attack the problem and solve the problem by doing it the right way. There’s only one solution, and that’s giving kids access to baseball at a young age and giving them a pathway to play at higher levels. That just doesn’t exist now. That’s why after 30 years of RBI, the numbers of Black players has continued to plummet year after year.”

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Bandura wrote a letter to The Players’ Alliance — a contingent of Black pro players committed to “change the trajectory of diversity throughout baseball” — but did not hear back. He wants the alliance to see the inner-city model he created and copy it around the country.

The Monarchs team his son played on produced 13 college players, and two of them — Scott Bandura and Richmond’s Jared Sprague-Lott — have a chance to be drafted this year. The grass field at Graduate Hospital (which Steve Bandura hopes to replace through fundraising with artificial turf so the Monarchs can help even more kids) has become a pathway.

“A lot of programs I see around the country are all icing and no cake,” Bandura said. “Just worried about what it looks like and how they can portray it on social media. It’s all icing and no cake. We have always been all cake with no icing until Mo’ne was the icing factory. Too much icing, actually. But we have a plan.

“The only reason you have more Black players playing now is because more Black families have moved to the suburbs, where there is baseball available. What we did here isn’t rocket science. All we did was copy the suburban model. We couldn’t go to all the tournaments that those teams could go to, but we got the same amount of instruction and tried to play the same amount of games against really good competition.”

Steve Bandura coached the Phillies’ RBI team for years and often would take some of the younger Monarchs with him to be bat boys.

“I took Scott to do that, and he just had no interest in retrieving the bats,” Bandura said. “He just wanted to sit on the bucket, watch, and eat seeds.”

Scott Bandura, who is studying economics at Princeton, has always been a sharp baseball mind. When he was 14, a teammate at the Little League World Series said Bandura had “the highest baseball IQ on the team.” His understanding of the game was never a question. But even his dad once had doubts that he could play past high school.

Bandura was small and didn’t look like a college recruit. But then he grew nine inches before his junior year at Springside Chestnut Hill and headed to Princeton.

The Tigers didn’t play his freshman year in 2021 because of the pandemic, which also shortened his senior year of high school, and Bandura missed most of last season with a hamstring injury. He was finally on the field this season and proved that he belonged.

He enters this weekend’s Ivy League tournament at Penn hitting .365, the second-best mark in the Ivy League and the 131st-best among all Division I hitters. Not bad for a guy who didn’t play much baseball over the last three seasons.

“I knew what I was capable of, but hadn’t been able to show it yet,” Bandura said.

Bandura is now 6-foot-4 and 190 pounds. College provided him with an offseason to spend in the weight room since he’s no longer following baseball season by playing soccer and basketball. The results are obvious as the kid who didn’t hit an over-the-fence home run until college has nine homers and a .635 slugging percentage this season.

Bandura, once thought to be too little for college ball, has a power swing with a chance to add even more muscle. Scouts often look at a high school prospect’s “projection” while focusing on a college prospect’s “production.” But with Bandura, there’s still projection to dream about as he continues to grow.

Bandura’s “42″ tattoo cost him less than $100 and takes up a small piece of real estate near his wrist. It’s often covered by long sleeves when the Tigers play in chilly weather, and it’s not big enough to attract much attention. But for Bandura, the ink is enough to remind him every day of where he came from and where he hopes to go.

“That’s always been the dream, to make it to pro ball,” Bandura said. “To be able to look back and see where I came from and how unique the Monarchs program is. Really show what can be done if you’re given the opportunities. Being an inspiration and role model to those kids is one of the driving factors for me.”

Added Steve Bandura: “It would mean a lot, not just to the program but to baseball in the city. It would point to what’s possible if inner-city baseball is done the right way. They’ve been taught about Jackie Robinson since Day 1, and it means a lot to them because we’re the only Black team almost everywhere we go. They can relate to it. It’s not just show. It means a lot to them. Jackie Robinson is a role model to them. A strong role model.”