Branch Rickey

by Jimmy Breslin

  Elroy Face later became the first person anybody in the Pirates ever saw in a Pittsburgh divorce court.

  Right here in the World Series clutch, it is the eighth inning and Pittsburgh is ahead, 6-2. The first Yankee batter is on base. That’s when the phone rang in the bullpen. Face was up, removing his jacket. Of course the call is for him. His first warm-up pitch to the bullpen catcher Bob Oldis is the forkball. It performs.

  A batter later, Face is on the mound, and Mickey Mantle steps in. He is batting left-handed against the righty Face. He starts swishing that bat. Elroy throws his slider. He likes this pitch in a sun-shadow hour. His slider is a ripple in the light, going sideways about six inches and a little down, coming in fast in the shadow on the left-handed batter. Strike one. The next pitch is another strike. Then, at last, Elroy throws his forkball. Mantle looks for it but it escapes his eyes and dives to his knees. Mantle is furious. He is a great competitor and he is walking off with the bat on his shoulder.

  It was the first of three saved World Series games by Face. Rickey watched this on television. He had started the year with great energy and plans to start a third major league. But then two heart attacks left him watching from an easy chair.

  In the last inning of the seventh game of the Series, Bill Mazeroski was the lead-off man for the Pirates. The score was 9-9. Mazeroski had been a second baseman for Hollywood in the Pacific Coast League. Rickey was enthralled with Mazeroski’s fast hands. They came from growing up with a coal miner father who had lost a foot in the mines and sat each day in a bare living room and rolled a baseball across a linoleum floor to his kid. Through so many hours each day, the boy bent and scooped and leaped to get his father’s throws. All you had to do was mention Mazeroski’s name to bring tears to Branch Rickey’s eyes.

  Ralph Terry, the Yankee pitcher, threw. Mazeroski looked. He did not look at the second pitch. He hit it over the left-field fence for the game and the championship and Branch Rickey sat home and watched Mazeroski’s joyous gallop around the bases.

  Go back a few years, to 1951, when Eddie McCarrick, a scout who had always worked for Rickey, brought a contract for the Pittsburgh Pirates minor leagues to a young ballplayer and college student, Mario Cuomo of South Jamaica, Queens, and St. John’s University. The contract said Cuomo was to get $2,000 for signing. Nowhere did it say he had to do anything more than sign the paper to receive the $2,000.

  His father, Andrea, stood behind the counter of the grocery store under the apartment where they lived, on the corner of 150th Street and 97th Avenue, and looked at the unfamiliar document. He was from the hills outside Naples and found English at least unfamiliar.

  “Baseball?” he said.

  “Yes, Pa.”

  “No, you finish school.”

  “But I can finish school and still do the baseball.”

  “No.”

  “I get two thousand dollars and I don’t even have to play.”

  Still the father was doubtful. There then arrived a letter from Branch Rickey saying that he wanted Mario to finish college, for it would help him and the Pittsburgh Pirates system. An educated ballplayer is best, he said.

  Andrea Cuomo seemed impressed with the letter. He waited until Mario was not in the store. He then walked around to a neighborhood lawyer who spoke Italian and had him inspect the letter and the contract. The lawyer said both were all right.

  On the Easter vacation break from St. John’s, Cuomo went to Deland, Florida, the Pirates minor league camp, and was placed with the Brunswick, Georgia, Class D team. He was in the batting cage, trying to hit balls coming out of a fractured pitching machine. One was too high, the next in the dirt, the third perhaps hittable. The balls were scuffed. Then an old guy came into the cage. He wore khaki pants, a T-shirt, and no baseball spikes. He didn’t need a uniform or much of anything else, just a bat. He was George Sisler, and when he played, he hit .400.

  Cuomo had trouble with an inside pitch and Sisler said quietly, “Don’t fight it.” The machine threw inside and Sisler stepped back and hit the ball hard. “Now for an outside pitch,” Cuomo remembers him saying, “just lean over.” An outside pitch came and Sisler hit it as hard as he had the inside pitch.

  Cuomo was watching him closely. Sisler had a set of eyes and a pair of hands that worked as one. A freak, Mario decided.

  Chasing flies in the outfield, Cuomo put whatever he had into every pursuit and wound up with a charley horse. He was told that Rickey wanted to see him. Mario walked up to the house that was the Pirates camp headquarters. Sitting on the porch was Rickey. “He asked me about my leg and then he said you need patience. You don’t run wild on the first day. Then he told me that there was a grandfather bull and his grandson on top of a hill looking at a herd of cows. The grandson said, ‘Let’s run down and spear one.’ The grandfather said, ‘Why run? Let’s take our time, walk easily and spear them all.’ I remember being surprised he would tell a story like that. You know, everybody in the camp received a subscription to Guideposts. That was a religious magazine. I was still getting it at home long after I was out of baseball.

  “Rickey said he wanted to talk to me because I was going to finish college. I remember him telling me, ‘You’re fortunate. You have something that a lot of others can’t have. Stay with your education. You can try baseball for a while and then you’ll have the college helping you for the rest of your life.’ ”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There was another contest in those late years to which Branch Rickey paid attention. He thought it important that Richard Nixon sweep past Kennedy in the 1960 election. He was sure his judgment was infallible. To Rickey, the campaign between Nixon and the dreaded Kennedys looked like the final struggle. He saw the end of decades of Republican principles if his man lost, so he put in a thousand phone calls squalling about the Kennedys. One of those calls went to Jackie Robinson and, of course, Robinson listened. By then he was an executive with Chock Full o’Nuts, the fast-food chain, and this had to cause his natural resentments to rise. If this was the best he could find, a job in a company with black help that he was hired to impress, he could barely tolerate it. This was a figure known all over the world, a man with a fine mind, and they had him with countermen. In a letter to a friend, magazine editor Ray Robinson, Jackie wrote, “I feel as strongly in favor of Nixon’s principles, ethics and intellectual honesty. Would you have me support a Kennedy who met with one of the worst segregationists in private and then this man, the governor of Alabama, comes out with strong support for Senator Kennedy?”

  In his first hours in America, Barack Obama, Sr., made it a few feet out of the airport before the sight took his breath away. He was here to study at the University of Hawaii, whose courses appealed to him, as did the vision of a blessed Hawaiian sun. Studying in Honolulu, he brought a strong thirst. If he could have stayed away from bars, perhaps he wouldn’t have missed his son’s big day at the White House.

  In 1960, one year after Obama arrived at the university, the major Kenyan politician Tom Mboya had 250 more American college scholarships for his Kenyan students, all of whom were to be admitted to big schools that would change their lives. Mboya had sent a telegram to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of whom was John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was starting his campaign for the presidency. A telegram also went to his eventual opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who was delighted at the notion of Kenyans on his side to impress the black vote. Call State and tell them what I want, he told his staff. Why should he, the vice president, lower himself to ask a State Department bureaucrat to fly 250 Kenyans here so they can go to great colleges? The answer is, he should have done just that. The bureaucrats turned Nixon’s office down, giving clout a terrible name.

  At this time, Branch Rickey was living in Pittsburgh, retired. A true Republican, he made many phone calls to Jackie Robinson, also retired, to complain about Mboya’s tactic. He railed, “Kennedy will try to steal home immediately!”

  Robinson
agreed. He wrote bitterly against Jack Kennedy in a column for the New York Post. After that, he called Senator Hugh Scott, the Republican from Pennsylvania, who came on the Senate floor to attack the Kennedys for going around the law and paying privately to bring in the Kenyan students.

  Joseph P. Kennedy was on the porch of his house in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with three of his sons, Jack and Robert and Edward, all of whom thought it would be a smart campaign move to fly the 250 students here from Kenya. Jack Kennedy asked his father if they could pay the airfare out of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation.

  “When will they be at the airport in Kenya?” the father asked.

  On a glorious day in the summer of 1960, Tom Mboya stood on a lawn with the Kennedys, and the Cape Cod water glistened alongside the family homes, as they spoke of a beautiful future for young blacks from Kenya’s raw poverty. The airlift brought 250 young Africans to America. Rickey’s team lost the election.

  One afternoon, Bob Prince, the announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates, visited Rickey at Fox Chapel. Rickey was showing him styles of bird hunting. He had his grandson, Branch III, bring out his favorite shotgun plus one for Prince. They went behind the house and young Branch scaled clay pigeons for Prince. Rickey instructed him and Prince fired.

  Prince knew nothing about guns, which he revealed by blasting the air for twenty straight misses. “Let me show you,” Rickey said. The grandson handed his grandfather his favorite shotgun, but in handing it over, the gun went off. It was barrel down, so only blew up the earth between Rickey’s feet. The boy remembers that his grandfather never mentioned the incident. “He wouldn’t let me feel guilty about anything,” the grandson said.

  The record of his last days shows that there were few invitations that he turned down.

  An old program from a dinner at the Daniel Boone Hotel in Columbia, Missouri, on November 13, 1965, lists Branch Rickey as speaker.

  He gets there after attending the seventh game of the World Series, in Minneapolis, in which Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers threw a two-hit shutout. Nobody could see his pitches. It was a mixed thrill for Rickey. Koufax came out of an Ice Cream League on Flatbush Avenue, blocks from Ebbets Field, but Rickey wasn’t in Brooklyn to sign him.

  When he got to St. Louis, Rickey was stricken with a high fever and the hospital couldn’t figure out its source. Rickey demanded his release. He had in his pocket an invitation to his induction into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame at the Daniel Boone Hotel. Nobody wanted him to go, but he did. They arrived to sit in the wind and cold at the Missouri-Oklahoma football game. He sat in distress under a blanket. Missouri won. Back in his hotel, Rickey slept. Then he got up and went to speak at the dinner. He was sure he couldn’t speak two minutes. He did somewhat better. All the time his chest was telling him that it was the bottom of the ninth.

  “In football they call it guts. Courage, we call it in literature,” he said from the podium. “Is there a difference between them? . . . I’ll call it moral courage, and I’ll give you two illustrations of it.

  “There was a fellow on my team in years gone, Jim Bottomley. He had courage, he had that sort of thing that when you come to the testing point, it never occurred to him whether he had it or didn’t have it.

  “When the game was in the eighth inning and the score was a tie, he came to bat and he got a base on balls. A fellow named Hornsby was the batsman and the question was, with a pitcher who couldn’t hold runners on base, whether to let this base runner loose.

  “It so happened that the day before the game began, Burt Shotton, who was the captain of our team at that time, came up to me and said, ‘Do you think Jim can play today with his bad hip? Have you seen it?’

  “I said, ‘No, I haven’t seen it today, although I did a couple of days ago.’ He had a big slider, they call it, on the right hip.

  “Bottomley dressed and I said to the captain, ‘If he doesn’t object, if he takes fielding practice, let him play.’

  “Bottomley took fielding practice and he did play. And there he stood on first base in the eighth inning with the score tied and Hornsby up.

  “I had a little lecture that morning—I had morning meetings always about forty minutes long, every day for several years—and I had talked on paying the price, this thing of having some objectives on which there is no price tag. You either want it or you don’t want it. You either want it so bad that it doesn’t matter what the price is, you don’t care what it is. The question is whether you can pay it.

  “I did flash the sign to Bottomley and cut him loose to let him run if he wanted to . . . I saw him slide into second base, I saw the umpire motion him safe, a very close play. I saw him stand up and pull his pants away from his injured hip three or four times. I thought, That dumb fellow, he could have gone the other way, he need not have made the slide on that hip.

  “The game was over. Hornsby singled. Bottomley scored. We won the game, 3-2, and I went into the dressing room.

  “I said, ‘Jim, why in the name of common sense didn’t you slide to the left and away from that hip?’

  “He just looked up at me with the most innocent stare in the world and said, ‘Why, Mr. Rickey’—he always called me Mr. Rickey—‘didn’t you see where Maranville was standing?’

  “Maranville was the opposing shortstop standing on the inside of the bag to take the throw. Bottomley had to go the other way to elude the tag. It never occurred to him to think anything about prices for anything . . .

  “For the other side of it, I will use an illustration from the Bible. I don’t want somebody to say I’m an old molly-coddler or anything. It just happens that this chap I’m telling you about, in my judgment, had the greatest amount of courage as any man in the Bible, more than David, Samson, or Paul. Taken by and large, he was a little fellow. I don’t think he could have been over five feet tall. Wealthy, he had embossed shirts and custom-made suits. He was dressed better than anyone around Jericho . . . He was a tax gatherer . . . hated by most people . . .

  “I don’t believe I’m going to be able to speak any longer.”

  He stepped back from the podium and collapsed and fell into a coma. Branch Rickey died on December 9, 1965, a few days short of his eighty-fourth birthday. His funeral was held at the Grace Methodist Church in St. Louis. Jackie Robinson and Bobby Bragan found themselves in the back of the church. Bragan said, “Come on.” He and Robinson walked down to the second pew together and took a seat.

  EPILOGUE

  On those Brooklyn nights, her feet remembered, Jackie Robinson ran the ballpark into bedlam. Marie F. Lewis, New York City election official and boss poll watcher, swayed from one foot to the other in the crowded polling place on the first floor of the Jackie Robinson elementary school in Brooklyn.

  She was mimicking Robinson tantalizing the pitchers when he was on base.

  She was a short woman with glasses and wearing a gray truck driver’s cap and a blue sweater. It was early November 2008, Election Night.

  “My aunt took me to Ladies Night. I don’t remember nothin’ but this.”

  She continued swaying from foot to foot. “Now you see me. Next, whooosh! I’m gone. Stealin’ the base on you.”

  Ebbets Field was a baseball park right across the street. Now it is a high, gloomy housing project whose ground floor bears signs that read “No Ball Playing.”

  On this night people came across the narrow street, Sullivan Place, and into the Robinson school to vote for president of the United States. Ms. Lewis was doing her duty, watching her polls. On Election Day she usually has three hundred voters at her booth. So far today two thousand have voted here and there are hours to go. She is here until closing.

  Ms. Marie Lewis sees something that stops her swaying and she walks up to this big, sullen kid with a Yankees baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He had just tried to walk into a booth and the poll watcher wouldn’t let him in.

  Ms. Lewis advanced on him, her face right into his, her syntax meticulous Ce
ntral Brooklyn.

  “You lookin’ at jail time.”

  Then came James Clark, forty-seven, in the district for eighteen years, a food service manager at a big law firm in Manhattan. And a guy carrying packages from a supermarket who said he came here from Jamaica in 1965; another who said he was from Virginia fifty-five years ago; and I am asking if anybody else here remembers Jackie Robinson playing across the street, and then there was sudden noise and I don’t know precisely what time it was, but the polls were closed and somewhere a television showed Barack Obama and a whoop ran through the corridor of the Jackie Robinson elementary school and the election workers were kissing and Ms. Marie Lewis was swaying and swaggering, her feet remembering the start of the long march that got us here.

  Bibliography

  Barber, Red. 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982. Reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1984.

  Durocher, Leo, with Ed Linn. Nice Guys Finish Last. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.

  Long, Michael G., ed. First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson. New York: Times Books, 2007.

  Lowenfish, Lee. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

  Mann, Arthur. Branch Rickey: American in Action. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1957.

  Polner, Murray. Branch Rickey: A Biography. New York: Atheneum, 1982.

  Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1997.

  Robinson, Jackie, with Alfred Duckett. I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography. 1972. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

  Robinson, Rachel, with Lee Daniels. Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Abrams, 1996.

  Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.