Ethnic prejudice has no place in sports, and baseball must recognize that truth if it is to maintain stature as a national game.

The statement frames racial/ethnic discrimination not as a peripheral social issue but as a direct threat to sport’s legitimacy. By calling baseball a “national game,” Rickey links the sport’s moral credibility to the nation’s professed ideals of fairness and equal opportunity. The conditional—baseball must “recognize that truth” to “maintain stature”—implies that exclusion diminishes the game itself: its competitive quality, its public standing, and its claim to represent the whole country. Read in light of Rickey’s broader legacy, the quote also functions as an argument for institutional responsibility: leagues and owners must actively reject prejudice rather than treating it as an unavoidable custom.