Branch Rickey (6 page)

From the start he went right back to his notion of a farm system. On behalf of the Cardinals, he bought teams all over the country. Year in and out he signed players until he had 650 minor league prospects stocking teams of varying heft from Houston, Texas, to Syracuse, New York, to Topeka, Kansas, and points in between. Creating an army of prospects from which he could replenish the roster of the big-league team, Branch Rickey changed the look of baseball long before he ever heard of Jackie Robinson, so much so that Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's commissioner, became Rickey's mortal enemy.

In one ruling, Landis said no player signed by a major league team could be sent to the minors until he had been given a thorough tryout right at the end of spring training. Rickey howled. The rule stayed. There were more such rules inspired by Rickey's farm system, which was generally known as “The Chain Gang.” Players were bought and sold and assigned to teams without being asked. Not everyone was unhappy about it. The opinion of many sports people was, “These players are being taken out of the gas station and being paid to play. Who are they to complain about anything?”

Branch Rickey was neither a savior nor a samaritan. He was a baseball man, and nowhere in his religious training did he take a vow of poverty. There came a day in St. Louis that he looked at his famous first baseman, Johnny Mize, who could hit a ball several miles. Mize had led the league in batting and slugging. That he ran quite slowly was a drawback, except the Cardinals had so much speed that the team could accommodate a man with no feet. But then Rickey saw that Mize had developed a new flaw: he had grown an agent.

“John loves playing in St. Louis,” the agent said to Rickey. “If he could just get what he deserves.”

Though the Cardinals might have needed Mize's bat, Rickey now saw only a player who wanted more money than he was worth. Seeking to jettison Mize, he approached New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham, a restless drunk whom Rickey found sufferable only because whiskey made the man vulnerable.

“Johnny Mize would add glory to the spires of New York,” he assured Stoneham. In truth, the last thing the Giants needed was an infielder who lumbered. Rickey spoke of the glories of Mize until he had sold the player to Stoneham for $50,000, of which 10 percent went to Rickey. This was above Rickey's salary of $50,000.

He got that 10 percent commission on nearly every player he sold, and he sold hundreds of them, for price tags from a few thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. In the records, there are notices of sales for Bob Bowman ($35,000) and Charles Wilson ($59,000) and Nate Andrews ($7,500) and Don Padgett ($35,000), and you could sit there all night totaling these sales figures, with 10 percent off the top for Rickey. He made his biggest sale in 1938, to Chicago chewing-gum maker Phil Wrigley, when he unloaded one of the greatest players he ever managed.

“Answer me this,” Rickey asked his wife, Jane, one night when he came home for dinner. “Would you say I am somewhat intelligent? Would you say that as a result of Ohio Wesleyan and Michigan Law School that I am fairly well educated? Then why did I exhaust myself for four hours today with a person named Dizzy?”

Jerome Dean was a big, loose kid who ran out to the mound in the Shawnee, Oklahoma, tryout camp of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was six foot four and it appeared that he might be able to throw fast. This was late in the 1930 season. He would have been there earlier except the Cardinals' scout for his region, Don Curtis, worked only part-time for the baseball team and full-time with the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, and he was sorry but the rail schedule didn't allow him time to watch the kid pitch for the San Antonio Power and Light Company and bring him around until now.

Rickey, with a floppy canvas hat covering him from the sun, leaned forward to get a better look as Dean took the mound. A line of batters, hoping desperately to get the hits that would bring a contract, waited to face him.

On the mound, Jerome Dean raised his leg and threw. The first pitch was a fastball. He threw eight more to make three outs. Nobody even got a foul tip.

Rickey spoke quietly. Keep this kid out there for the next three batters. They did. Dean threw nine more strikes and still nobody touched the ball. Rickey's face and voice revealed nothing. Inside, he was experiencing the sensation that ran through him when he first saw George Sisler pitch and then swing a bat. If he said out loud what he was thinking now, that we are dealing here with a star who looks like he will still be a name in the next century, somebody would tell this kid and the first thing the kid would do is demand a freight car full of money. And Rickey couldn't have that.

He signed Dean for money suitable for counting on a candy-store counter and sent him to St. Joseph, Missouri, in the Western League. Dean won twenty-six games and was in St. Louis by the end of the season.

“Just tell the boys to get a couple of runs and I'll take care of the rest,” he announced. That happened. They let him pitch and in his first major league game he suffered misfortune by allowing three Pirates to get hits. At the hotel late that night he inspected the top paper on a bundle of first editions of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. “Damn!” he called out as he saw his picture big and smiling on the first page.

Rickey leaned on Oliver French, the general manager of the St. Joseph team, to take Dean into his home over the fall and winter. The Frenches found Dean charming but raucous: they had trouble sleeping when he went down in the cellar and threw pieces of coal into the open furnace.

Dean left the house one day and made his way to Rickey's office in St. Louis. He needed $150.

“He didn't give me any money,” Dean reported of the conversation that followed. “All I got was a lecture on sex.”

Dean once rented a car and drove it until it ran out of gas in the countryside. He left the vehicle there and hitchhiked back home. The rental agency had to send out a scout to find the car and they billed Dean $300. He not only couldn't pay, he wouldn't.

Dean was a four-time All-Star and led Rickey's Cardinals to a World Series win in 1934. A few years after that, Rickey sold him to Wrigley for $185,000, of which Rickey took his usual 10 percent.

 

By the time Rickey unloaded Dean, the pitcher's arm was largely shot, but four years later he made a move that wasn't nearly as shrewd. Rickey didn't need to travel far to find Yogi Berra and bring him to a workout at Sportsman Park. The catcher was a short, stocky, earnest guy who came out of the Hill District in St. Louis and could reach over his head and swat a pitch into next week. Casey Stengel said of him, “He acts like he's not very smart. But he's got a very good sports mind, which is good for a player to have.”

Yogi became Rickey's biggest mistake. Berra remembered this one day at an affair in his hometown, Montclair, New Jersey: “Jack Maguire, who was scouting for St. Louis, took me to a tryout Rickey ran with the Cardinals. He offered Joe Garagiola five hundred and then he watched me and said he would give me two hundred fifty. I wouldn't sign with him. He was going to the Dodgers the next year. He told the Cardinals that I wasn't so good. He wanted me with Brooklyn. At the end of the year he sent me a telegram saying I had to report to the Dodgers camp at Bear Mountain. I never did. I wasn't signed. I guess he still didn't believe I wouldn't sign with him. He figured he had talked me out of every place but his. So many people saw me playing that the Yankees heard I was good. That's where I went.”

 

We are now at the end of the 1942 season. Three years before this Rickey and the Cardinals owner, Sam Breadon, had a disagreement that became a bitter dispute that turned into anger that required an awareness of the perpetual need for lawful behavior. It was over money, don't worry about that. Breadon had cut every salary, including the cleaning woman's. Rickey made a Prussian surprise attack and announced that he would leave when his contract ended. The team had just won the World Series, but Breadon did nothing to make Rickey stay. So he left landlocked St. Louis, whose Southern customs blocked his true ambitions, and moved to Brooklyn, which had both feet in the Atlantic Ocean, whose tides slapped the shore and sent foam into the air, the spray and the waves carrying from all corners of the earth.

Branch Rickey loved to plan. He walked around with pockets filled with notes, and he would rush to board the train from New York to Philadelphia for a Dodgers road game and sit going through his notes without a dollar on him. Conductors rode him on credit. Once, his wife went shopping at a department store in Dayton, Ohio, while he attended a business meeting nearby. When he was finished, he told the driver to start for home. They were well gone when he suddenly remembered his wife. They rushed back to find her standing wearily on the sidewalk. He went through life carrying notes to himself on slips of paper, coffee shop menus, napkins. He could see months and even years ahead, devising tactics to fit future situations.

In these early years in Brooklyn, he worked on his six-point plan to integrate baseball. By 1945 he had already handled the first point during his meeting with George V.: secure the backing of the team ownership. The remaining five points were: (2) find the right Negro player and (3) find the right Negro
person
; (4) employ public relations; (5) gain support of the Negro community; and (6) gain acceptance by his teammates.

He started working on these points a full two years before the player arrived, before he even knew who that player would be. At lunch on one particular day, he walked down the street hoping to make some headway on point four, public relations.

Walter “Red” Barber, the radio announcer for Dodger games, met Rickey in Joe's Restaurant on Fulton Street, a few blocks from the Dodgers office. Barber was out of Mississippi and Florida and had a voice to prove it, soft and Southern yet understandable, and calling to mind magnolia blossoms. The voice captured Brooklyn. Red Barber might have been the most literate, the most thrilling, of announcers, calling plays with unforgettable understatement and humor. “We're in the catbird seat,” he told listeners. Rickey loved it, but he also knew that all his planning could be useless without Barber's voice on his side. He could hear Barber from every car radio, barbershop, kitchen window. This became his dearest tactic. Proximity! Rickey would hypnotize everyone with Barber's familiar voice carrying the exploits of the new player through the streets of Brooklyn, into Manhattan, and out through Long Island, his Southern voice reassuring all.

The two men sat across from each other at Joe's Restaurant. Breaking salt rolls into crumbs, Rickey immediately told Barber, “Mrs. Rickey and my family say I'm too old at sixty-four, and my health is not up to it. They say I've gone through enough baseball and [taken enough] from the newspapers. That every hand in baseball will be against me. But I'm going to do it.”

“He looked straight into my eyes,” remembered Barber, “fixing my attention.”

Rickey said, “I'm going to bring a Negro to the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Barber remembered Branch Rickey speaking slowly as he said it: “I'm going to bring a Negro to the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Barber sat straight and silent.

“I don't know who he is,” continued Rickey, “or where he is, but he is coming.”

From somewhere, small sounds rose through Barber's memory and became loud and formed a crowd in Sanford, Florida. A harsh, bare, hot sun burned down from above. Red Barber, age ten, was on the edge of a crowd of jeering, nasty men in Ku Klux Klan robes. They shoved a black man, crying, tarred and feathered, along the streets. Barber was told that he was witnessing a great event.

In remembering this, Barber always quoted the one line that might be the best written in English in our time: “I had been carefully taught.”

Now Barber was witness to a truly great event, Branch Rickey's assault on ignorance. “All the men in baseball understood the code,” Barber recalled later. “A code is harder to break than an actual law. A law is impersonal. Often a man breaks a law, is clever enough to get away with it, and people think he is a smart fellow. But when you break an unwritten law, a code of conduct, you are damned, castigated, banished from the club so to speak. You are a renegade, a scoundrel, an ingrate, a pariah.”

Leaving Joe's that day, Barber felt that lesson becoming heavier and harder. He walked across to the subway, took it to Grand Central Station, and there in the vast splendor, with so many people walking quickly by him at the end of a day's business, he told himself that he couldn't do it. He wouldn't announce a game with a black in it. He reasoned to himself that he always hung out with players before the game, after it, at dinner. This habit gave him anecdotes for his broadcasts. He never could do this with a black player. Nope. He took the train home to Scarsdale.

He walked into the house calling out to his wife, Lylah, that he was quitting. Had to quit. He thought he should call Rickey right now and end it. Lylah Barber thought about that. She was from as far south as her husband was. She also knew that she had a nice, expensive house in southern Westchester County. She was an adult.

She said, brightly, “You don't have to quit tonight. You can do that tomorrow. . . . Let's have a martini.” Lylah mixed her husband a big glass of gin and some ice. When he drank it, and allowed that he might have another, she relaxed and had one herself. Barber wasn't going anywhere.

 

It was somewhere around this time that Jackie Robinson, with all his strength and intelligence, was going around on tryouts. They were destined to break his heart. He went to Fenway Park in Boston accompanied by the baseball writer Wendell Smith, who was trying to help. There was a clubhouse attendant who let them into the park and a batboy or a groundskeeper operating the pitching machine. You had Jackie Robinson ready to show what he could do and nobody wanted to watch. Robinson hit a few and decided to leave. Somebody called good-bye as they left. The Red Sox owner, Tom Yawkey, would spend the next twenty years keeping blacks off his teams and he got what he deserved, which was nothing. He made it in life thanks to his family's huge lumber business, never having to lift a board himself. This was a background similar to those of other baseball owners. Only a few of them, including Rickey and George McLaughlin, appear to ever have done a day's work. This type of experience seemed to mean something. Dan Topping of the Yankees knew what it was like to be shot at in a war, and Chicago's Bill Veeck, who lost a foot in battle in the Pacific, not only wanted to play a black, but was ready to play an all-black team.