by Roger Kahn
Against these attacks toward a seat of manhood, the Dodgers set themselves in belligerence. When Leo Durocher, then married to the Mormon actress Laraine Day, shouted at Jackie Robinson, “My dick to you,” Robinson backed out of the batter’s box and cried, “Give it to Laraine. She needs it more than I do.” On another occasion, Durocher, who was coaching at third, removed his cap and scratched a bald scalp. “Hey, skinhead,” boomed a voice from the Brooklyn dugout, “put on your hat before somebody jerks you off.”
Like small boys out to demonstrate toughness, the Dodger bench was loud and hypersensitive and defiant. At the same time, a number of players worked shows of unconcern. “Choking up” simply did not exist, they said. It was imagined in press boxes. What was choking anyway? some Dodgers said they wanted to know. “Well,” remarked Captain Pee Wee Reese, with a small, sad grin, “when you chew gum and saliva don’t come, you’re choking.”
Athletes, like surgeons and concert violinists, know the dry mouth of pressure. It costs them sleep and shapes their dreams. Baltimore once signed a righthander named Paul Swango, who mentioned, after depositing a bonus check, that he did not like to pitch in front of crowds. Swango disappeared into the deep minors, where attendance is sparse. He was not heard from, or heard of, after that. When Roger Maris hit sixty-one home runs in 1961, the pressure of constant interviews so upset him that he began to lose bristly clumps of hair. He never had another comparable season. But neither Swango’s nerves nor Maris’ ordeal is typical.
Pressure can stunt an athlete, but evidence argues powerfully that a major league ball player is fully grown. To make the majors at all, a man first survives other pennant races, other play-offs. As he rises, pressures rise with him. A Little Leaguer feels the eyes of his parents and his neighbors and his teammates when he comes to bat. If he wriggles helplessly, he has found something out. High-pressure competitive baseball is not for him. A minor leaguer, driving toward the majors, has coaches and scouts studying him every day. The man who collapses into tremors with men on base dies, as the saying is, in Peoria.
A big league ball player ordinarily performs at a specific level, with crests, called “hot streaks,” and dips, called “slumps.” Tension plays on him, but, in the imprecision of human behavior, one can never anticipate how. “I didn’t want to go in and pitch against Bobby Thomson,” Clem Labine concedes. “If you asked me then, I would have said, ‘Sure, I’m not afraid of anything.’ But whatever you say, nobody wants a spot like that. If they’d asked me, I’d have thrown the best I could and Thomson would have taken his best cut. Who knows, he could have hit me into the upper deck.” One day, under pressure against Labine, Thomson whipped himself to overanxiousness. Against Branca he whipped himself toward glory. With Thomson—with almost every big leaguer, it seems to me—choker and hero are two masks for the same plain face.
On the team Billy Cox played dramatically when most was at issue. He hit Giant pitching hard and in two World Series his fielding moved Casey Stengel to grumble, “That ain’t a third baseman. That’s a fucking acrobat.” Cox’s attention diffused over a long season. Important games refocused it. Pee Wee Reese played well in many crucial games. Duke Snider tied a record by striking out eight times in the 1949 World Series. In 1952 he tied the Series record for home runs. Carl Furillo batted .353, .125, .177 and .333 in his first four World Series. If one wants to advance the overriding choke hypothesis, he must follow labyrinthine paths through inconsistency, leading finally to the borders of mysticism.
But choking concerned many Dodgers because they heard of it so frequently. Even Carl Erskine, when described as “pebble-game,” wondered if the writer were making an obscure reference to swallowing. Erskine could not pitch as often as some others because of chronic arm trouble, which he bore in silence. All the Dodgers’ fundamental lacks were physical. When I was with them, they had no overpoweringly strong pitcher. Christy Mathewson of 1905, Tom Seaver of 1969, won the big games, dominated the World Series and carried a team. Without a superpitcher the Dodgers lost some important games. But self-doubt followed failure. It did not cause it.
Wesley Branch Rickey arrived in Brooklyn during World War II fired by two dreams that were to falter. He would build a dynasty to surpass the Yankee empire in the Bronx. He would personally achieve enormous wealth. Rickey became Dodger president after Larry MacPhail responded to the blast of World War II and re-enlisted. MacPhail’s Dodgers, assembled under a threat of bankruptcy, could not long endure. Rickey reached Brooklyn thinking in terms of generations, and, as soon as peace came, and manpower stabilized, his Dodgers emerged, formidable, aggressive and enduring. “My ferocious gentlemen,” he liked to say. Although Rickey had been banished to Pittsburgh by 1952, every important Dodger pitcher, without exception, had been acquired during his remarkable suzerainty.
Raised on an Ohio farm, Branch Rickey graduated from the University of Michigan, considered becoming a Latin teacher, but chose baseball. Old records indicate that he performed marginally. He caught for the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders—the paleozoic Yankees—doubling as an outfielder. In four years he batted an aggregate .239. Then he managed in St. Louis, moving from the Browns to the Cardinals. He never brought home a team higher than third. Gruff Rogers Hornsby replaced Rickey in 1925 and the Cardinals won the World Series in 1926. Rickey was forty-five that year, and without great distinction. Then he moved into the Cardinal front office and his life turned around. As an executive, Rickey let his intellect run free; broadly, as Henry Ford shaped the future of the business of automobiles, Rickey shaped the future of the game of baseball. It was Rickey who invented the so-called farm system, baseball’s production line. He stocked the sources, a half dozen teams, with young, uncertain talent. As their ability allowed, ball players advanced. In one case in twenty-five, a player proved gifted enough for the majors. It was a bloodless procedure, but effective, and presently the Cardinals dominated the National League. Rickey paid execrable salaries—$7,500 a year was high pay. Considering the attrition rate, he had to curb expenses, but Rickey was also a man of principle. He had a Puritan distaste for money in someone else’s hands.
In the mid-1940s he bought minor league teams for Brooklyn and the old Latinist, having organized a Dodger farm system, next created a camp where legions of players could be instructed. He chose an abandoned naval air station, four miles west of Vero Beach, Florida, as the training site. There among palms, palmettos, scrub pines and swamp, he made a world. The old Navy barracks, renamed Dodgertown, became spring housing for two hundred athletes. The mess hall now served not navigators but infielders. Outside, Rickey supervised the construction of four diamonds, five batting cages, two sliding pits and numberless pitcher’s mounds, everywhere pitcher’s mounds. Pitching excited Rickey. It moved him to melodramatics.
At one meeting of the Dodger command, Rickey lifted a cigar and cried, “I have come to the point of a cliff. I stand poised at the precipice. Earth crumbles. My feet slip. I am tumbling over the edge. Certain death lies below. Only one man can save me. Who is that man?"This meant that the Dodger bullpen needed help and would someone kindly suggest which minor league righthander should be promoted? It is a tempered irony that Rickey’s sure hand failed him where he most wanted sureness. He was unable to produce a great Brooklyn pitching staff.
Pitchers, of all ball players, profit most from competitive intelligence. It is a simple, probably natural thing to throw. A child casts stones. But between the casting child and the pitching major leaguer lies the difference between a boy plunking the piano and an artist performing.
A major leaguer ordinarily has mastered four pitches. The sixty feet six inches that lie between the mound and home plate create one element in a balanced equation between pitcher and batter. No one can throw a baseball past good hitters game after game. The major league pitching primer begins: “Speed is not enough.” But a fast ball moves if it is thrown hard enough. Depending on grip, one fast ball moves up and into a righthanded batt
er. Another moves up and away from him. A few men, like Labine, develop fast balls that sink.
The fast ball intimidates. The curve—“public enemy number one,” Chuck Dressen called it—aborts careers. A curve breaks sideways, or downward or at an intervening angle, depending on how it is thrown. Branch Rickey regarded the overhand curve as the best of breaking pitches. An overhand curve, the drop of long ago, breaks straight down, and, unlike flatter curve balls, an overhand curve is equally appalling to righthanded and lefthanded batters. The pure drop, hurtling in at the eyes and snapping to the knees, carried Carl Erskine and Sandy Koufax to strikeout records (fourteen and fifteen) in World Series separated by a decade.
Finally, the technique of major league pitching requires excellent control. Home plate is seventeen inches wide; and a man does best to work the corners. A good technical pitcher throws the baseball at speeds that exceed ninety miles an hour, makes it change direction abruptly and penetrate a target area smaller than a catcher’s mitt.
Art proceeds subsequently. The artful pitcher tries never to offer what is expected. Would the batter like a fast ball? Curve him, or, better, throw the fast ball at eye height. Eagerness leads to a wild swing. Strike one. Would the batter like another? Now throw that public enemy, down and dirty at the knees. Strike two. Now he’s on notice for the curve. Hum that jumping fast ball letter-high. That’s the pitch he wanted, but not there, not then. Sit down. Strike three called. Who’s next?
The pitchers are different from the others. They work less often, but when they do, they can hold nothing back. Others cry at a loafing pitcher, “Bend your back. Get naked out there.” Action suspends and nine others wait until the pitcher throws. All eyes are on the pitcher, who sighs and thinks. “Ya know,” Casey Stengel said about a quiet Arkansan named John Sain, “he don’t say much, but that don’t matter much, because when you’re out there on the mound, you got nobody to talk to.” Pitchers are individualists, brave, stubborn, cerebral, hypochondriacal and lonely.
There was so much that Rickey thought that he could do with pitchers. At Vero Beach three plates were crowned with an odd superstructure. This was the strike zone, outlined in string. Pitching through strings, Rickey said, let a man see where his fast ball went. He devised a curve-ball aptitude test. Hold pitching arm with hand toward face. Grip ball along seams. Draw arm back fully so that ball touches point of shoulder. Now throw as far as you can. One can throw neither far nor hard. The test humiliates most people, including good major league curve-ball pitchers.
Rickey erred, retrospect suggests, in overestimating the body and in underestimating the insecurity of pitchers. His favorite overhand curve tortures the arm. A line of strain runs from the elbow to the base of the shoulder. An extraordinary number of Rickey’s best pitching prospects rapidly destroyed their arms. In trainer’s argot, they stripped their gears.
One gentle, soft-featured Nebraskan, Rex Barney, threw overpowering fast balls, although, as Bob Cooke said so often, he pitched as though the plate were high and outside. Rickey led Barney to the strike zone strings at Vero Beach and commanded, “Please pitch with your right eye covered.” Presently he said, “Pitch with your left eye covered.” After months of test and experiment, Barney was still wild, and now given to periods of weeping. Rickey threw up his hands and ordered Barney to a Brooklyn psychiatrist. Before he reached thirty, Barney became a bartender. Another major talent, Jack Banta, was finished at twenty-five. Ralph Branca won twenty-one games when he was twenty-one years old. He retired to sell insurance at thirty.
Can each failure be laid at Rickey’s grave? No more than one can credit Rickey with Duke Snider’s 418 home runs. A model Rickey team played magnificently. A model Rickey pitching staff writhed with aching arms and nervous stomachs.
The first flaw laid bare another. Rickey treated newspapermen with condescending flattery, as one might treat stepchildren, recognizing them as an inescapable price one pays for other delights. In Pittsburgh once he invited me to his box. He was then president of the Pirate team that would lose 101 games. “Good you could come,” the master began in a hoarse, intimate whisper, placing a hand on my arm. Bushy, graying eyebrows dominated the face. “I have a question on which I’d value your opinion. What do you think of Sid Gordon?”
“Well, he’s slowed down, but he’s a strong hitter and an intelligent hitter. His arm is fine and he can catch a fly.”
Rickey nodded in excessive gratitude. “How would Sid fare at Ebbets Field?” The gnarled hand squeezed my arm. “On an everyday basis?”
“He’d belt a few to left.”
“And right,” Rickey said. “And right. Don’t you think he could clear the scoreboard with regularity?”
“Why, yes. I suppose he could.”
Rickey winked. “I appreciate your sharing your views. I don’t mind telling you I’m concerned about the Dodgers. So many are my ball players. I’m afraid they may not win it, in which case many will blame bad luck, which would not be the entire case. Luck is the residue of design.”
As I left, Rickey remarked, “You know, of course, Gordon was born in Brooklyn.” His putative design was altruistic. His real intention was to have me urge the Dodgers to buy Gordon in the pages of the Herald Tribune. Publicity is the paradigm of salesmanship.
Balancing this deviousness, which hindered reporting, Rickey offered utter mastery of the phrase. His rolling Ohio-Oxonian dialect was a delightful instrument. Were the Pirates going to win the pennant? I asked once. “Ah, a rosebush blooms on the twelfth of May and does it pretty nearly every year. And one day it’s all green and the next it’s all in flower. I don’t control a ball club’s development the way nature controls a rosebush.” Was his star home run hitter, Ralph Kiner, for sale? “I don’t want to sell Ralph, but if something overwhelming comes along, I am willing to be overwhelmed.” To what did he attribute the Pirates’ poor record? “We are last on merit.” Was he himself discouraged? “My father died at eighty-three, planting fruit trees in unpromising soil.”
Once away from the days of this year, Rickey could be quite direct, but in the running of current business he was wed to intrigue. By the late 1940s his relationship with Dick Young and the Daily News had become catastrophic.
Where Rickey was rotund, classical and Bible Belt, Young was spiky, self-educated and New York. Rickey was shocked by alcoholism, extramarital sex and the word “shit.” Young was shocked by Rickey’s refusal to attend Sunday games after a week of misleading reporters. A war was inevitable. Its Sarajevo was bad pitching.
Young began baseball writing in 1943, at twenty-five, and very quickly stretched the accepted limits of the beat. He wrote not only about the games but about the athletes, giving each of the players a personality. It was traditional to present athletes as heroes. Newspaper readers learned that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Grover Cleveland Alexander were grand gentlemen and a credit to the games of baseball and life. Young had heroes—Reese and Campanella—but he fleshed out his cast with heavies. He called Gene Hermanski “a stumbling clown in the outfield.” Hermanski responded by shoving Young, a compact five feet seven. But Young would not cower. He loved his job, which “a lot of very rich guys would give an arm to have,” and relished the power it provided, and worked at it in original ways. He cultivated some players, argued with others, writing hard stories and soft ones, but always defending his printed words in person. If Young knocked a man on Tuesday, he sought him out on Wednesday. “I wrote what I wrote because I believe it. If you got complaints, let me hear ‘em. If you want better stories, win some games.”
In time Young came to know the Dodgers better than any other newspaperman and better, too, than many Dodger officials. He sensed when to flatter, when to cajole, when to threaten. As far as any lay reader of instincts can say, Young possessed a preternatural sense of the rhythms and balances of human relations.
Conversations with several Dodgers strengthened Young’s harsh conclusion that a number of pitchers lacked heart and, after one
losing game in 1948, he composed a polemical lead:
“The tree that grows in Brooklyn is an apple tree and the apples are in the throats of the Dodgers.”
There is a nice implicit pun here on Adam’s apple, but the first thrust is Young’s thought. Some Dodgers cannot swallow. They are choking.
Branch Rickey had been schooled on a tame sporting press, easy to manipulate. He could not or would not recognize Young as the centurion of a new journalism. He would not even discuss choking frankly. Instead, he expressed private loathing “for everything about that man and what he stands for.” In public he patronized Young, who above all things would not be patronized. By the time Rickey left Brooklyn in 1950, he was battling Young, Young’s boss, and consequently the most widely read newspaper in the United States. In the Daily News, Jimmy Powers, the sports editor, identified Rickey as “El Cheapo.” Young ghosted Powers’ column ten times a year. The News would not mention Rickey’s manager, Burt Shotton, by name. Instead, Young lanced the bubble of Shotton as genial paterfamilias by giving him the acronym “KOBS.” The letters, forged in sarcasm, stood for Kindly Old Burt Shotton. The Dodgers lost because of, won despite, KOBS.
These assaults did not hurt Dodger attendance, but they murdered egos. When Rickey left, and Walter O’Malley became president, his first order of business was to replace KOBS with Dressen. Then O’Malley appointed Emil J. Bavasi, a warm and worldly Roman, as general manager de facto (at $17,500), and vice president in charge of Dick Young.
With time, one comes to regret that two such talented men as Rickey and Young fought so bitterly. Neither, I suppose, was faultless, although Rickey, being older, more secure and less tractable, probably warrants more blame. He went to his grave as a babe in public relations.
