Rickey kept one aspect of Brooklyn baseball history on a shelf well out of reach. That was the Daffiness Boys reputation that so many loved because it was real. Rickey wanted to win games not laughter. Now came through the door a Queens County high school graduate, William Loes, who brought back the past. Because he could pitch, Rickey signed him. Because he made everybody laugh and feel better, Loes is remembered today as a great Rickey success.
Rickey’s best-known afternoon in Brooklyn came when Loes was a high school prospect from the Astoria neighborhood in Queens when he arrived in Brooklyn one afternoon with his father and George Douris, who had been the official scorer for Loes’s no-hitters with Bryant High School. They went to lunch with Rickey, which made Loes’s father nervous about the check. “Don’t worry,” Douris said. He couldn’t pay either.
Rickey asked Loes if he had a girlfriend. Billy took this as a question of his manhood. “I don’t care about girlfriends. I want to know how much money you’re going to pay me,” Billy said.
He was twenty and an afternoon out of a high school hallway and he was going right against the famous Branch Rickey. Of course this was the act of a daffy boy. So daffy he walked out with a $21,000 bonus; in that year and in Astoria, in Queens, it was most wonderful money.
In the old and famous baseball field in Brooklyn, Ebbets Field, there were two decks behind home plate and on October afternoons there were moments when the sun came between the two decks and blazed in the eyes of a pitcher. Which was Billy Loes’s occupation for the then Brooklyn Dodgers, now in Los Angeles.
He was on that mound and open to those sunrays in the 1952 World Series against the Yankees. That year, he was back from army service and won thirteen games, pitching four shutouts and with an earned run average of 2.69. In his four best years for the Dodgers he won fifty games. That was hardly humorous for batters. Everybody else made Loes daffy.
The night before the 1952 World Series, Loes predicted the Yankees would win in seven games. In the sixth game, the baseball slipped out of his hand while he was standing on the rubber. That error moved a runner up. “Too much spit,” he said. Then Vic Raschi, the Yankees’ pitcher, hit a grounder that Loes bent to get but couldn’t see. It slapped off his leg and caromed into right field. A run scored.
“I lost it in the sun,” Loes said. He became the first player ever to lose a ground ball in the sun.
Everybody loved it. The celebrations over this also missed a small point: the sun did come through the stands in cruel rays every October, and a fine pitcher like Carl Erskine noted, “The fact is, if you ever pitched in Ebbets Field you know that’s possible in October with a ball that takes a bounce.”
Billy died at eighty in Tucson, Arizona. He left a smile that always goes with somebody looking him up and reading again his so highly sensible reason for it all: “Go on and write what you want about me and say I said it. You’ve been doing it right along anyway.”
Though Durocher was back in the dugout, by July 1948 things were going badly. When the Dodgers lost six games in a row, Rickey, in the hospital with a urinary infection, sent somebody to the clubhouse to ask his manager to quit. Leo refused.
Then there was rueful rumbling from the Polo Grounds, where the sainted Mel Ott, the Giants manager, was on his way out. Rickey and Horace Stoneham of the Giants talked. “I need a manager,” Stoneham said.
“Would Durocher do?” Rickey asked.
“I’ll have somebody over to sign papers in an hour,” Stoneham said.
The Brooklyn and Giants fans, who had been taught to hate for so long, were stunned and betrayed. The newspapers treated it like Pearl Harbor.
Eventually, Walter O’Malley saw a way to steal an entire baseball team. He became the best friend in the whole world to John Smith of Pfizer. O’Malley was bad-mouthing Rickey and talking with John Smith and George V. McLaughlin about expenses, Rickey’s salary, and his inability to handle Durocher, and, oh, yes, he is a great baseball man and he is in such knots over this Robinson that we best look after running the business of the Dodgers.
O’Malley went from being a commercial lawyer working for the Dodgers’ owners to someone who sat at games alongside Rickey and noisily wrangled with him. Rickey owned 25 percent of the Dodgers. In time, O’Malley also owned that amount. John Smith of Pfizer had another 25 percent as did the Brooklyn Trust Company.
Then John Smith died and his widow put their Dodgers stock in O’Malley’s hands. He now controlled half the team. The Dodgers were in the kind of pennant race that makes baseball. However, there was money to be grabbed. Rickey’s contract was up at the end of the year and O’Malley wouldn’t give him an answer about renewing his contract as general manager.
“I’m going to walk out of here with a million dollars,” Rickey announced.
“So walk,” O’Malley said.
Rickey made it as far as Pittsburgh. This is a sad day for Brooklyn, George V. McLaughlin said. He happened to be at his job when he said this, and there is no crying inside a bank vault.
In Brooklyn, Rickey left behind one person who had almost always stood up for him. Years later, Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel, as regal as anybody we’ve had in the city, stands in the moist night air of Coney Island while politicians and reporters and old fans crowd around a statue that showed Pee Wee Reese, the great Dodgers shortstop and still a favorite, with his arm around Robinson’s shoulder. It depicted the moment in a game against the Cincinnati team when mental illness roared out of the dugout and from the grandstand and Reese in response walked over to Robinson and put an arm on Jackie’s shoulder. The sports writers felt it was a great American moment. Now, on this morning dedicating the statue, trying to keep Brooklyn’s baseball past alive, although the team had left for California almost fifty years before, Rachel Robinson appeared at Coney Island. She looked at the statue and recalled to herself vividly the actual scene of years before.
“This is so wonderful, you must be thrilled,” Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, said.
“Yes, it is,” Rachel Robinson said.
She hated it. If there was one thing she and her husband despised, it was being patronized by whites. The pat on the shoulder by Reese was viewed as a wonderful thing, as if to say, See, we like you. That pat, that gesture, came only once, though. The true record of the years of Pee Wee Reese and Robinson is contained in a photo of the two walking off the field side by side after an inning. They were looking down, ballplayers going to the dugout. Reese’s white left hand was only inches away from Robinson’s black right hand, but neither of them noticed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Satchel Paige needed no monument. He needed cash. Bill Veeck knew that.
Paige was out of Mobile, Alabama, with no birth certificate to indicate his age, which on the occasion we mention here, in 1947, could have been about fifty. His schooling in Mobile was Reform School. This still is Mobile’s shame, for he was a genius at American-language usage: “Don’t look back. Somethin’ might be gainin’ on you.”
He gave you three innings for your money, did Satchel, and you would have to thank him forever for giving you, a mere mortal, that much. You only had to say it once, that Satchel Paige would be pitching on Wednesday night at Dexter Park in Queens, New York. The place could hold 15,400 and it was packed by 6:00 for a 7:05 game. At 6:30 all players had finished their pregame warm-ups. There was no Paige. Max Rosner, the owner, now was at the front gate. He was fretting a little. No Paige. Then Rosner’s hands started to shake. Still no Paige. Rosner soon was walking in a tight circle. At 6:40 a limousine pulled up and the great Paige got out. A valet carried his uniform. He walked straight to the dugout, where he changed. Satchel went out to the mound, threw a couple of warm-up pitches, and then was ready. He showed the crowd everything. His most famous hesitation pitch, with a great, big windup for a fastball that people could barely see, much less hit. He had a name for every pitch. Bee ball, jump ball, trouble ball. Dizzy Dean said, “If Satch and I were pitching
in the same team, we’d clinch the pennant by the Fourth of July and go fishing until World Series time.”
Paige usually would reach a point where he turned and instructed his outfielders to sit while he blew his fastball past batters. After this performance he left the field, stopped at the office to collect his fee, then got into his limousine for a ride to a later paid appearance or anyplace with a ballpark close enough to reach.
Bill Veeck, who employed Paige when he owned the Cleveland Indians back in the 1940s, called me one day in 1968 about him.
He said that Paige could not collect any pension money because he was thirty days short of having enough time on a major league team to qualify. Veeck thought this was a felony. He wanted me to call Tommy Reynolds, who owned the Atlanta Braves, and tell him he had a moral obligation to hire the pitcher as a coach for thirty days so he’d be eligible. Did he need the money? Whatever Paige had made lasted as long as a puddle in the sun.
Jack O’Neill happened to be around on the day Veeck called. O’Neill had hit .321 for Little Rock in the Southern Association and just missed coming up to the Red Sox. Finishing with the Bushwicks, he batted several times against Paige.
“How good was he, anyway?” I asked O’Neill.
“Pretty good.”
“Like how good?”
“Like Walter Johnson.”
“He’s pretty old to bring in,” I said.
“You stole the start of his life. Maybe you took thirty years off him because he was black.”
Paige at this time was somewhere between age sixty-nine and seventy-five. I called Reynolds, who at the moment was at the bar of the Pump Room in Chicago. I caught him with a few drinks in him and he was enthusiastic about Paige. I told him he should do the right thing and hire the old pitcher.
A couple days later he called and said that the Braves players and coaches were afraid that Paige could drop dead hitting fungoes. If he was going to be a coach, then he would have to work a little—pitch some batting practice, maybe catch somebody warming up in the bullpen, work with base runners, just enough activity. Nobody knew exactly how old Paige was, and he was not exactly forthcoming on the matter. Birth certificates were not fashionable in his time. But he had to be the oldest person on a major league roster outside maybe some ancient manager.
Reynolds hired him anyway and Paige survived through the season and got his pension. One Saturday at Shea Stadium, I took my twin boys and we stood in the tunnel under the stands and here comes Paige out of the Atlanta dressing room. He had his valet behind him, carrying a big boom box. Paige was going out to the Atlanta bullpen and he wanted music.
He came walking past us without as much as a nod.
“Hey!” I said. “You don’t know me?”
“I see you,” Paige said.
Royalty walked on, trailed by valet and boom box.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jackie Robinson’s hour was approaching. He was miserable with diabetes. Rickey, who had made his life, was gone to Pittsburgh.
In 1956, at thirty-seven, he was in only 117 games, with 43 runs batted in, and hit .275. In the Dodgers office they looked around: what is out there that we could get for him? The Giants had a pitcher, Dick Littlefield. Would they trade him for Robinson? The Giants owner, Stoneham, asked Robinson if he was going to play in 1957. Jackie said he would let him know later. That was a lie. He had already made an agreement with Tim Cohane of Look magazine to announce his retirement first in the magazine. Certainly for money. Look was a big, slick bi-weekly that would be the first of so many to disappear. The magazine commerce would remain a secret until surfacing as a big exclusive news story after the trade was announced. Robinson quit. He came out looking like a loyal Dodger for life.
My last memory of Robinson on the field was years earlier, him looking dazed and walking toward the clubhouse right after Bobby Thomson hit the home run to give the Giants the pennant in 1951.
Branch Rickey was a country boy from birth but he lived his career in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, New York. His time in those cities was spent mostly in ballparks and offices, though. He was not much for movies or theaters or nightclubs or restaurants. His lovely granddaughter Christine, a college student, signed a contract with the Conover Model Agency in Manhattan and spent the summer there in search of bookings. Rickey was comfortable with that. She performed in public, much as his athletes did. Christine stayed at the Barbizon Hotel for Women on Lexington Avenue, which was the closest thing the city had to a young woman’s chaperoned residence.
Grandfather Branch agreed with this arrangement. But his rule for her in New York was that she not go out with anyone to whom she had not been properly introduced.
One day the girl’s mother called Rickey to inform him that Christine had just telephoned her, excitedly, to report that she had been properly introduced to a man who owned vending machines for a living, and he took her to a place called Jilly’s Bar on 52nd Street, and it was a nice bar, a lovely bar, a wonderful bar, and they all knew her slot machine king and she met Jilly, and Jilly—you wouldn’t believe it!—walked her over to the end of the bar and introduced her to his great friend, Frank Sinatra, who was there with his own great big bodyguard.
Rickey was gasping on the phone.
Jilly later reported to all in his joint, “Frank had to use the men’s room so he told the gorilla, ‘Watch her with your life. If anything happens to her, they’ll reopen Alcatraz for me.’”
Rickey got Christine on the phone. “You are a beautiful flower. You have a lovely garden for your life. And you go into it and find weeds.” Only her most heartfelt pleading allowed her to remain in the city and the model business until school started again in the fall.
Then Rickey was gone from Brooklyn, first back to St. Louis, which was no good for him anymore, and to Pittsburgh, which was not much better. So he sat home and watched television and went to meetings.
Rickey sits in retirement in his splendid house in Fox Chapel, outside of Pittsburgh, and watches the Pirates and the New York Yankees in the first game of the 1960 World Series. They play just down the road, at Forbes Field. In his last job in baseball, Rickey had put this Pittsburgh team together. The Pirates had a 6-2 lead going into the eighth inning. Here was Roberto Clemente, as good a player as you could ever find, and Dick Groat, Bill Virdon, Bob Skinner, and Bill Mazeroski, who was the last player Rickey scouted, and that’s where it all ended, all fifty years or so of running big-league baseball teams.
Rickey’s other priceless find for the Pirates, Elroy Face, just about invented relief pitching. Through his years, Rickey always said that he didn’t think much of relievers. In Pittsburgh, he left Elroy Face sitting on the bullpen bench, holding a pitcher of ice water while he waited for the fire bell to ring. He is the first major leaguer to save 20 games more than once. At this moment he waits for his first chance to save a World Series game. The word “save” is what it says: the relief pitcher comes into the game with his team ahead but shaky and the other team is supposed to have a shot and Elroy gets out there and calmly shatters opposing hearts by removing the bat from the hands of anybody who comes up.
He had a new pitch that year. Branch Rickey had made finding it a condition of his employment. Elroy was with the Pirates’ New Orleans farm team in spring training at Fort Myers, Florida, listening to Rickey, whose sunhat was pulled down to these eyes that sparkled with excitement. Rickey, an old catcher, could talk incessantly about grips. “A fastball and a curve isn’t enough,” he said. “You need something, a change. To put indecision into a batter. ‘What is coming now?’ Put a question in the hitter’s mind, to bother the timing, to raise doubt.” Rickey said that Joe Page, the old Yankee relief pitcher, was around the camps looking for a job. Page was throwing an obscure pitch, a forkball. Face heard this, too. In Florida, he saw Page’s hand, fingers spread wide, and watched the pitch.
That season, Elroy tried a forkball at New Orleans. The first thing he had to do was remind his forefinger and
middle finger to make room for the ball. He was born with the space. Others had to work for a year to teach the fingers to spread. Even young fingers groan. The forkball was held between the two fingers without touching the seam. He threw it with a fastball motion, but the ball came out as a change of speed and right in front of the plate it dived. One way this time, another way the next. If you never saw the pitch before, and only a few had, it gave trouble to the eyes.
In spring of 1959, Rickey said to him, “I hear you have a new pitch.” Face was throwing and Rickey was in the box behind the plate at Fort Pierce. His forehead was pressed against the netting. Face threw. Fastball. Well, we know he can do that. He watched Face’s curve. All right. See if he has another. The forkball came in. Dropped like a stone. Again, Face threw his forkball. It dropped in another direction. Marvelous. This boy did not sit around for the full year. He worked!
In 1959 Elroy won 18 games and lost 1. These were huge days in his life and he tied them all to Rickey. When he married his fiancée, June, in her family home at McKees Rocks, he grabbed her hand during the reception and took her out to the car for a quick drive to the Pirates office at Forbes Field. It was during the All-Star break. He walked into Rickey’s office with his new wife. Rickey was elated. He believed that all his players should be married. It grounded them. When Elroy said they had been married in a Catholic church, he was even happier. Rickey loved religions. A long time ago, in 1906, he promised his girlfriend, Jane Moulton, that he would marry her if he had a successful year and they would know that by June. She wanted the marriage, but wouldn’t have minded if he dropped baseball. She was a merchant’s daughter and was not quite delirious over these uneducated farm boys and gas station attendants. By June, Rickey was catching in the major leagues and he made good on his promise. He married Jane in 1906 in a Methodist ceremony. They were married for over fifty years.
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