Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  Whatever the reason, in 1942, Rickey’s quarter century with the Cardinals officially came to an end, just months after another St. Louis World Series victory. Rickey’s family urged him to accept an offer to move over to the St. Louis Browns; they wanted to remain in the city on the banks of the Mississippi. He was invited to join the Phillies, a lastplace team, and the challenge intrigued him. Also, Larry MacPhail bad left an opening in Brooklyn by entering the armed forces. Finally, Rickey left the choice to “Rickey’s Boys,” nineteen of his most trusted scouts and business managers in the St. Louis organization. They opted for Brooklyn, arguing that the big-city population there would provide a strong financial base. Guaranteed a free hand to try out any and all new techniques with the Dodgers, Rickey said, “It was the kind of opportunity I just could not turn down.”

  The last superstar to rise from Rickey’s St. Louis farm system was Stan “The Man” Musial. Rickey’s first glimpse of Musial was at Hollywood, Florida, in the spring of 1941. What he saw was a fair twenty-year-old pitcher who could swing the bat. Rickey pleaded with Springfield club officials to take a chance on the youth. The aspiring pitcher, who had damaged his shoulder, was converted into an outfielder. He played in eighty-seven games with Springfield and batted .379. Moved up to Rochester, Musial batted .326 in fifty-four games. Promoted to the Cardinals, the man from Donora, Pennsylvania, batted .426 in a dozen games at the tail end of the 1941 season. Musial fit into Rickey’s historic pattern of the minor-league star brought up at the end of the season for grooming into big-league status and to help in a tight pennant race.

  Moving on to Brooklyn, Rickey left behind in St. Louis a great team, including Musial, Red Schoendienst, Enos Slaughter, Terry Moore, Marty Marion, Whitey Kurowski, Mort and Walker Cooper, and Harry Brecheen. He had provided Cardinal fans with Jesse Haines, Dizzy and Paul Dean, Joe Medwick, Pepper Martin, Ripper Collins, Jim Bottomley, Chick Hafey. . . .

  In two dozen years with the Cardin ls, Rickey had earned more than a million dollars in salary and bonuses. Before Rickey arrived, the Cardinals had finished in the first division just three times in twenty years. With Rickey on the scene, there were nine pennants and six World Championships in twenty-one seasons.

  Now in his sixties, at an age when most men are content to look back over times past and look forward to the serene years of retirement, Branch Rickey marched ahead to his boldest adventures.

  Chapter Five

  Building Days in Brooklyn

  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had written to baseball commissioner Landis on January 15, 1942, in the second year of World War II, “I honestly think it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.” Despite the number of major-leaguers in the service, the gas shortages that kept people at home, and the reduced attendance, baseball kept going with a patchwork of averaged veterans and deferred younger men. In 1942, 219 major-leaguers were in the armed forces. The number increased to 242 the next year. By 1945, 385 major-leaguers were in the service.

  Retrenchment was the theme for virtually every majorleague club. The dwindling supply of able-bodied ballplayers convinced most executives that the war was something to be waited out. Most attempted just to get by with what they had and plan for the future when the war ended.

  Installed as the new general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a teetotaler in the freewheeling atmosphere of Ebbets Field where a cocktail lounge had been provided for the pleasure of visitors, Branch Rickey was not one to wait things out.

  At a January 1943 meeting at the New York Athletic Club, the sixty-two-year-old Rickey outlined his plans for the future. The Dodgers had given him a five-year contract at $50,000 a year, an unlimited expense account, incentive bonuses if annual attendance topped 600,000, and a percentage of revenue from the sale of players. Rickey met with George McLaughlin and George Barnewall of the Brooklyn Trust Company, 50 percent owner of the team in trust for the Ebbets estate, Joe Gillauedeau of the Ebbets interest, and Jim Mulvey representing Ed and Steve McKeever, who owned the rest of the stock.

  Rickey noted that while the Dodgers had won the 1941 pennant, they had been beaten out in 1942 by his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Rickey knew the talent that was in the Cardinal system, and he knew that they would be a formidable club for a long time to come. He maintained that the Brooklyn organization was faced with a bleak future unless radical innovations were put into effect.

  He explained that he planned to hire “many more scouts, and to beat the bushes for talent, for new talent . . . to sign fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds so the Brooklyn club will be in possession of so large a complement of youth . . . boys of all skills and sizes . . . that our position for the future will be assured.”

  There were no objections, so Rickey added: “The mass scouting might possibly come up with a Negro player or two.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t come up with a Negro,” McLaughlin interrupted. The two men had met secretly before the luncheon and had arranged this part of the talk. “You might really come up with something. If you find a man who is better than the others, use him.”

  “A Negro player or two,” Rickey continued, “will not only help the Brooklyn organization—but putting colored players in the major leagues will also accomplish something that is long overdue. It is something I have thought about and believed in for a long time.”

  St. Louis sports editor J. Roy Stockton noted, “Rickey faces a new challenge this year; he cannot follow the old routine he originated-building a great farm system. The system depends on hungry young athletes, and baseball’s fertile fields now are sending their young men into the armed forces. . . . For the duration, Rickey will be operating under a disadvantage. But those who know believe he’ll find a way, and baseball will experience another revolutionary innovation of some kind.”

  There were those who looked upon the playing of wartime baseball as inappropriate. Rickey viewed baseball as a necessity in the war years. A month after the New York Athletic Club meeting, he issued the following statement:

  “We need to hold on to such diversions as tend to relieve us from the ever-increasing sorrows of war. The good health of our people is not conserved by continuous and almost compulsory reflection upon their personal heartbreaking losses, which are bound to come and are coming even now. . . . We need to be cheerful fighters or as cheerful as we possibly can be. For the Japanese, to die is to be glorified. To live hopefully and joyfully is the American objective, and our fighting to live must match the religious frenzy of the Japs who fight to die.”

  Rickey was so caught up with “fighting to live” that he broke his personal ban on attendance at Sunday games. He appeared at the pregame ceremonies at a Dodgers-Phillies contest to make a speech to boost war bond sales. “For this occasion,” he said, “and for this reason, because it’s worthy, I will speak and then leave the ballpark.”

  By the summer of 1943, the scouting--machinery of the man they called “The Brain” was in place. Approximately twenty thousand letters had been sent to high school coaches all over the United States asking them to recommend the best prospects available. The Dodger scouting staff was increased fourfold. As the high school coaches responded to the letters, Dodger scouts were dispatched to check out leads. More than four hundred players were signed to Dodger contracts. Most of them were too young and too inexperienced to be of immediate value, but as Rickey explained, “We are building for the future, and if the war is over in two years we expect wonderful results. We’ll be fully developed, and after that I envision pennants, pennants, and more pennants!”

  Hundreds of hopefuls showed up at an Olean, New York, tryout camp. Some were signed to minor-league contracts. One was selected for a personal evaluation by Branch Rickey at Ebbets Field. Just nineteen years old, he played one game with the Dodgers in 1943 at third base. He walked once and struck out twice. Rickey signed the Indiana-born youngster to a $I,250 bonus. Half was paid ori signing, and the player received the other half two and a half years later wh
en he returned from service in the United States Marines. Rickey made a note that the player would be best as a catcher or first baseman. In 1947, Gil Hodges re-joined the Dodgers and was positioned at first base, where he became one of the anchors of the powerful Dodger team. From 1949 to 1955, he recorded a hundred or more RBis a season and averaged more than thirty-two home runs a year.

  Edwin “Duke” Snider was another future Dodger star discovered by Rickey’s extensive scouting system. As a seventeen-year-old, he had performed very well at one of the Dodger tryout camps and was invited to the I 944 training sessions at Bear Mountain. He pounded a three-run homer in an exhibition game against West Point. Assigned to Newport News, Virginia, the Brooklyn farm team in the Piedmont League, he showed the talent and the tempestuousness that one day would excite Dodger fans. His Newport News manager, Jake Pitler, once flashed the take sign to the young left-handed swinger. The sign so infuriated Snider that he kicked in rage at a water bucket and demanded that he be sent to play for another team in the Dodger organization. Nicknamed ‘’The Duke of Flatbush,” Snider starred in center field for the Dodgers and hit more home runs, drove in more runs, and recorded more extra-base hits than any other player in the team’s history.

  Newport News at one point had fifteen players under eighteen years of age. Manager Jake Pitler dubbed himself a “glorified babysitter” and kept a large supply of comic books and just a small supply of shaving cream on hand for the kiddie corps that included Tommy Brown, Preston Ward, Duke Snider, Clem Labine, Steve Lembo, and Bobby Morgan. The press referred to Rickey as “The Old Woman in the Shoe,” developing players were called “Mother Rickey’s Chickens.” By 1946 the chickens were spread thick over the twenty-five farm teams of the Dodgers, from Montreal to Ponca City, from Abilene to Zanesville. The raw talents that were signed during the war years were now being developed into finished major-league products.

  The heart of the Brooklyn Dodger team that would dominate the National League through the late 1940s and 1950s was recruited by Rickey’s youth dragnet. Rickey began to implement his policy of moving out veteran players and replacing them with young players of unlimited potential. He traded away Brooklyn favorite Dolf Camilli, and angry Dodger fans hanged him in effigy. When he attempted to explain his moves, his Montague Street office was referred to as “The Cave of Winds.” It was a pointed reference to Rickey’s skill with double-talk. Once, when asked if he would have any influence in the selection of a coach by Dodger manager Leo Durocher, he responded: “Generally speaking, no. But I might. And could and should perhaps. In a given case, that is.”

  The man they called “The Deacon” was a collector of terms and phrases and expressions that he employed for effect over and over again. “Anesthetic” was his term for players like Camilli whose brilliant past obscured their limited current value. “There are anesthetic ballplayers,” he observed. ‘’You watch them all year, and you say they are not contributing much to the team. Then they show you a lot of impressive statistics. They put you to sleep with statistics that don’t win games. It is time to trade a playea! s soon as he reaches the twilight zone of stardom.”

  A player who had poor reflexes and timing was a “dead body.” A “pantywaist” was Rickey’s way of referring to an athlete who was a nonwinner, a follower. He often used military language: a “captain” was a take-charge player, while those who did not have much of a future on his team he called “corporals.” “Privates” were those who .lacked any real future anywhere in baseball.

  Among Rickey’s tradable “corporals” were Gene Mauch, Rocky Bridges, Bob Ramizotti, Bobby Morgan, Stan Rojek, Eddie Miksis, and Danny O’Connell, all shortstops. In his turn each was touted as “the new Pee Wee Reese” by the old Ohio horse trader as he successfully dispensed them throughout the major leagues. The original Pee Wee Reese played shortstop for the Dodgers for sixteen seasons. While others on the team hit peaks and valleys, Reese was the steady man, the “captain” of the Brooks. He recorded more than two thousand hits in his career.

  In Brooklyn, Rickey also continued his fabled trading: Baseball executive Bill Veeck once paid Rickey a backhanded compli)llent by refusing to make trades with Rickey face to face. “I would send and receive notes via a bellboy. I was afraid being in the same room with Mr. Rickey would mesmerize me.” A holdout player advised to get together with Rickey to compromise on salary differences once declared, “Not me. I ain’t going to see Mr. Rickey. Five minutes with him, I’ll sign anything he hands me, and I won’t be a holdout anymore.”

  One of Rickey’s favorite expressions was “Luck is the residue of design.” By covering every option, by planning five, ten, fifteen years into the future, by working while others slept, by maintaining careful and copious records, Rickey went about cultivating his own luck.

  One of his favorite speeches was entitled “Paying the Price—Are You Willing to Do It to Achieve Success?” Two lines he always used were “I would prefer turbulent progress to quiet stagnation” and “I would rather have the errors of enthusiasm than the indifference of wisdom.”

  Bill Shea, for whom Shea Stadium is named, was an attorney for the Brooklyn Trust Company back then. He recalls some of The Deacon’s choice declarations on youth, the subject he was much involved with at the time: “When you’re eighteen years old and can’t run fast, you’ll never run fast. If you can’t throw the ball hard at eighteen, you never will. If you haven’t got a heart at eighteen, you’ll never get one later on. If your morals are bad at eighteen, you’ll never improve.”

  His oratorical skills, his fear of heights, his nonalcoholic, workaholic habits, his ten-room house in what was then suburban Forest Hills, his ten-acre saltwater farm in Chestertown, Maryland, and his Sabbath baseball ban—all fleshed out the image.

  Back in Duck Run, the fundamentalists were not impressed with Rickey’s boycotting of Sunday baseball. They argued that the cash that came in from Sunday games paid weekly salaries. “Drinking the devil’s broth when you wouldn’t eat the devil’s meat” was their phrase. In New York City, reporters had choicer words for the man who refused to attend games on Sunday because of a promise he had made to his mother those long years back. When Rickey took refuge in the Bible and explained, “On the seventh day He rested,” they didn’t appreciate the comparison.

  The bow-tied Ohioan became grist for newspaper copy and graphic material for cartoonists. Many stories echoed Enos Slaughter’s comment, “Mr. Rickey was always going to the vault to give you a nickel’s change.” Cartoons depicted Rickey in a stovepipe hat, offering shotguns and fishing poles to callow youths and then chaining them to a baseball diamond. He was shown struggling with chains and locks in front of armored vaults, depositing cobwebbed coins.

  His bushy eyebrows, his ever-present cigar, and his pontificating manner helped make him an easy target. “There is a reasonable expectation of additional emolument,” Rickey told a player during salary talks. “Ya mean more dough, doncha, boss?” the player asked.

  Some of Rickey’s critics referred to him as a “carpetbagger” because he had come from St. Louis to Brooklyn. Others used the phrase “the nonalcoholic Rickey,” a slighting reference to his teetotaling ways. Sportswriter Tom Meany bestowed on him the title “Mahatma,” inspired by John Gunther’s description of Mohandas Gandhi as “a combination of God, your own father, and Tammany Hall.”

  John Carmichael, former sports editor of the Chicago Daily News, once suggested that Rickey be named as areplacement for secretary of state. “It is our firm belief,” wrote Carmichael, “that if President Truman would sic Rickey on Russia, Joe Stalin would wake up one morning to discover that all he had left was Siberia plus a couple of southpaw pitchers who wouldn’t report. By March , Rickey would have Stalin playing for Pepper Martin in Miami.”

  Jimmy Powers of the New York Daily News led the pack of Rickey detractors. He launched attack after attack in his “Powerhouse” columns. It was Powers who came up with the nickname “El Cheapo,” claiming Rickey
never dealt fairly with players in contract negotiations. In July 1946, Powers wrote, “This column will welcome suggestions from Brooklyn fans: what shall we do with El Cheapo? Shall we send him over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Shall we maroon him on Bikini Atoll? One reader suggests that all fans get together and each donate a $20 bill upon entrance to the ballpark. A grocery store chain has kindly consented to donate twenty empty barrels. If the fans will help fill these barrels perhaps Rickey’s desire for milking money out of the franchise will be satisfied and he’ll pack his carpet bags and go away to another town and run his coolie payroll there.”

  The comments enraged Rickey’s family, friends, coworkers in the Dodger organization, and even other journalists. Rickey chose to ignore them, not wishing to dignify them with a public reaction. Privately, he seethed.

  In what was apparently a public relations gesture aimed at defusing the El Cheapo image, Rickey gave each member of the 1946 Dodger team a brand-new Studebaker automobile. Even this did not satisfy Powers. He wrote that the gifts were a waste of money and that Rickey was simply attempting to “buy” the loyalty of the players with the new cars.

  Arthur Daley of the New York Times came to Rickey’s defense in a column he wrote on October 2, 1946, entitled “The Branch That Grows in Brooklyn.”

  “There’s been a rather persistent campaign under way for most of this season to discredit Branch Rickey and, even though it has been waged by a writer whose credit rating in his profession is zero minus, it’s been rather irritating,” Daley began. Acknowledging that Rickey “is not an easy person to understand and to catalogue, and his intimates among those connected with sports are extremely few,” Daley addressed himself to the question of Rickey’s alleged frugality. The New York Times columnist pointed out that the Dodger players “bought the Mahatma a cabin cruiser as a token of their esteem . . . in a spontaneous, voluntary gesture . . . and players have never been known to be ultragenerous in handing out gifts to their own.”