History on Harris's side?

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- The cottage that once stood on James Madison Sasser's plantation is gone. It burned down 10 years ago, according to the blue historical marker on Hadley Perry Road in Cairo, Ga., hometown of Willie Harris, the aspiring Red Sox utilityman.

It was here on Jan. 31, 1919, a sharecropper's wife, Mallie Robinson, the daughter of slaves, gave birth to her fifth child, Jack Roosevelt Robinson. A little over a year later, her husband having run off with another woman and Sasser making it all but impossible economically for her to raise her family, Mallie Robinson packed up her brood and headed west, to California.

When Jackie Robinson came back to Georgia in 1949, this time as the star of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the first player to break baseball's color line, scores of Cairo's citizens loaded onto buses bound for Atlanta, defying a threatened boycott by the Ku Klux Klan of games between the Dodgers and the all-white Atlanta Crackers. Those games drew overflow crowds to Ponce de Leon Stadium in Atlanta, at the time the biggest crowds ever seen at a sporting event in Georgia.

The marker designating Jackie Robinson's birthplace went up just four years ago, five years after Major League Baseball instructed all teams to retire Robinson's number as part of the half-century celebration of Robinson's big league debut. The high school baseball field is now Jackie Robinson Field, renamed when Harris was a senior, in 1996, and the main drag in town, Harris said, is now known as Jackie Robinson Memorial.

Cairo (pronounced Kay-ro) responded in a much more timely fashion to honor Harris, its second native son to make the big leagues, after he scored the only run in the deciding game of the 2005 World Series, a 1-0 win by the Chicago White Sox over the Houston Astros.

''What was cool to me wasn't the [victory] parade in Chicago or the party after the game but when I returned home to Cairo," Harris said here the other day. ''It was unbelievable. They had a parade for me. Nov. 4 is now known as Willie Harris Day in Cairo. My street where I grew up was named after me. I had a chance to visit the House of Representatives in Georgia.

''To go back home and ride that big fire truck in that parade and see all the people there, that meant the most to me. My mom, Geraldine Harris, and my daughter, Arriana, were there, and my friends. And [in] another fire truck in front of us were all my former high school players. They retired my high school jersey. It was just unbelievable.

''I want to win another one, just to see what they'd do for me."

If it should happen again, it won't be with the White Sox. Harris, who was Chicago's starting second baseman in 2004 but lost his job to Tadahito Iguchi, is here with a chance to win a spot as an extra infielder and backup center fielder. He has the speed -- 210 stolen bases in 804 pro games -- to be a Dave Roberts-type pinch runner, and even though his only two postseason at-bats came three weeks apart, he boasts a 1.000 postseason average. He singled home a run off Bronson Arroyo of the Red Sox in Chicago's 14-2 rout in Game 1 of the Division Series, then punched an opposite-field single to left off Astros closer Brad Lidge and came around to score on Jermaine Dye's base hit in Game 4 of the White Sox' sweep of the Astros.

''I'm going to make the club -- I'm on a mission," Harris said. ''There's opportunity here. It's just up to me.

''I know my role. I know what to expect. We really don't have any spots open. Coco [Crisp] is in center, [Mark] Loretta's at second, so there's nowhere to play every day. I just want to come in and show these guys if you need me, I'm here. Whatever they have for me, in my mind, I'm going to make this team."

Harris would appear to have a legitimate shot at doing so, depending on the number of pitchers the Sox carry. If it's 11 -- and they're likely to start the season at that number, with two offdays in the first week -- Harris has a chance to stick on a bench that will include infielder Alex Cora, a backup catcher (John Flaherty is favored for that role), and possibly Dustan Mohr, who has the inside track to platoon with Trot Nixon in right field. It becomes more problematic if manager Terry Francona elects to carry 12 pitchers, which he's inclined to do, and just one backup outfielder.

There's another wrinkle. Reserve outfielder Adam Stern must spend 17 more days on the major league roster if the Sox don't want to send the Rule 5 player back to Atlanta, which would mean Stern, if healthy, would start the season in the big leagues ahead of Harris. Harris has language in his contract that would allow him to become a free agent at some point in April if he's not in the big leagues.

''But we don't need to talk about that," he said, again confidently predicting he'll be on the club.

Harris, who is listed at 5 feet 9 inches and 170 pounds and played wide receiver well enough in high school, he said, that Florida State coach Bobby Bowden paid a recruiting visit to his home, said he learned of Robinson while doing a report on him in middle school. For that report, he said, he interviewed Dr. Linda Walden, a pediatrician in town and a distant cousin of the Hall of Famer.

''It's sad, seriously, not only that a lot of people don't know about him, but a lot of African-Americans don't know about him," he said. ''I think they should recognize Jackie Robinson more down where I live. I think they should know, the younger athletes coming up, what he's done for us and for the game of baseball."

Robinson probably would not recognize Cairo, a small town just north of the Florida border, only 30 miles from Tallahassee. But he might see a little of himself in Willie Harris.

''When I play the game, I want to be recognized as an old-school ballplayer," Harris said. ''I know we're in a new era, but go hard all the time, run the bases regardless of where the ball is, that's old-school baseball. You never know, I might not be here tomorrow, so I've got to give everything I got today."

Mallie Robinson shook the red dust of Georgia off her shoes and never looked back. For Harris, Cairo is home, and always will be, though his return last November was considerably happier than the trip he made back the previous spring, when he took bereavement leave from the White Sox after the mother of his daughter was killed in a car accident. Cairo, where more than 50 percent of the population is African-American, is a good place to raise a family.

''That means a lot to me, to go home and let those kids know coming up that you can go out and do whatever you want to do," Harris said. ''You just have to have the work ethic and mind-set, and have God and faith that you can do whatever you wish."