Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  In the pattern of a Rickey farm system, the major-league team controlled scores of minor-league rosters through what were then called working agreements and are now known as PDCs, player development contracts. Essentially, ballplayers throughout the minor leagues function under contracts that are owned or controlled by teams in the major leagues. A major-league “farm director” distributes talent among the big club’s affiliated minor-league franchises, which are classified from Triple A (the best) down to rookie leagues. The bigleague team pays the players’ salaries and may also pick up other expenses for the minor-league operation, such as the cost of bats and balls and chartered buses. The players advance, or are released, entirely at the discretion of the big-league team. The minor-league club owner runs ticket sales, plans promotions and determines the price of ballpark beer. Although his title is team president, he is in effect a combination doorman and barkeep. He is not allowed to make baseball decisions. The “independent” minor-league team, locally owned and locally controlled, was formerly a staple of organized baseball. It is now largely an anachronism.

  Joe DiMaggio, a Bay Area youngster, broke in with the locally owned and controlled San Francisco Seals. Pee Wee Reese, a Kentucky native, first signed with the Louisville Colonels. Both minor-league teams eventually sold the contracts of these young stars for a significant profit. But that is not how things work today, in post-Rickey baseball. The actual talent in the minor leagues, the players—without whom, of course, there could be no games—are chattels of big-league teams, usually located a long way off. Some Massachusetts natives start playing pro ball in Oregon. Some Texans break in with teams in the Dakotas. “Our principal focus,” one farm director tells me, “is not where the athlete comes from. In fact he may do better away from the pressures of his family and his hometown. Our focus is on consistency of instruction, creating, so to speak, a uniform product.” I wonder if the McDonald’s Corporation got the idea of franchising its uniform hamburger salons from the baseball world invented by Branch Rickey.

  Curiously, or not so curiously, there was no hint of future integration in the Rickey farm system. His players were white, his managers were white, his coaches were white, and his scouts were white. If Rickey felt—he says he did—that a time for change was coming, he kept that to himself. Debates about the farm system were creating all the controversy he could tolerate.

  In 1939 Rickey’s St. Louis Cardinals had agreements with no fewer than 33 minor-league clubs. The Cardinals organization, which owned the baseball franchises in Rochester, Columbus and Houston, was an empire unto itself. One does best to think in terms of colonialism. In ordering the release of the 91 minor leaguers, Landis, who pined for fully empowered local ownership, provided what turned out to be only a hiccup in Rickey’s grand career. (But among the players Landis liberated was the implausibly gifted Harold Patrick “Pistol Pete” Reiser, who helped the Brooklyn Dodgers beat Rickey’s Cardinals out of the 1941 National League pennant. As a 22-year-old Brooklyn rookie, Reiser batted .341, which led the league.)

  For several years before 1939, Landis and his staff had been digging into the working agreements Rickey negotiated with a number of minor-league teams: Cedar Rapids of the Western League, Springfield of the Western Association, Crookston of the Northern League and Fayetteville in the Arkansas-Missouri League, among others. At length, when Landis reviewed the findings, he was appalled. The so-called working agreements, the commissioner told reporters in Chicago, “are being manipulated into arrangements for complete control of the lower classification clubs through secret understandings.” Rickey himself saw nothing wrong with having a working agreement with two teams in the same league. Landis maintained that this sort of thing affected pennant races. The parent club, the Cardinals, could load one team with talent at the expense of another. Why might this happen? The parent club’s first interest was in developing players, not in minor-league pennant races. You might want to stress speed on one club, strong-armed pitching on another or perhaps speed and pitching together. Landis, a lawyer and a former federal judge, decreed that “no [minor-league] club should contract away its right and obligation to get competitive playing strength as needed and whenever obtainable.” In simple English: Play to Win.

  Although Landis was an autocrat, he believed that minor-league club owners should be in complete control of their teams. Rickey, Landis charged, was “perverting working agreements with minor-league clubs so that he exercised complete control of various minor leagues.”

  Matters came to a head in 1939 during a hearing at Landis’s office in Chicago. “You have agreements with two teams, Danville and Springfield, in the Three-I League so that you, in St. Louis, can influence the Three-I League pennant race,” Landis told Rickey. Landis lowered his pointed chin and glowered. “The agreements are big as a house, aren’t they?”

  Rickey: “No, sir. Not as big as a house.”

  Landis: “They are as big as the universe.”

  Landis proceeded to lecture Rickey toward the point that pennant races in the Three-I League were “just as important as races in the National and American Leagues.” Rickey’s farm system, a baseball octopus, was strangling minor-league competition, Landis warned.

  Despite Landis’s threatening manner, Rickey continued developing his farm system, but now he became careful to work with only one minor-league team per league. Across the 1930s and 1940s as many as 59 minor leagues came to exist in America, from San Diego up through Maine, and Rickey’s farm system and bank accounts flourished. Landis did not again intercede. “The general feeling in baseball back then,” wrote J. G. Taylor Spink in an authoritative biography, Judge Landis and Twenty-Five Years of Baseball, “was that farm systems were here to stay and the Judge had simply cleared the air, promoting competitive pennant races throughout organized baseball.”

  Privately, Landis referred to Rickey as “that sanctimonious son of a bitch,” and “that Protestant bastard masquerading in a minister’s robe.” I can neither find nor recall instances where Rickey spoke critically of Landis. It would have been destructive and pointless to badmouth baseball’s historic czar.

  In a decision handed down in 1922, the US Supreme Court issued a classic ruling. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. exempted organized baseball from antitrust laws and standard government business regulations, maintaining that baseball was “first and foremost, a sport and not a business.” I played fast-pitch softball for many years alongside a shortstop named Charles “Cy” Rembar, who after-hours made a fortune practicing constitutional law. Rembar, a student of American legal history, wrote an authoritative book called The Law of the Land. Holmes’s 1922 baseball ruling, Cy Rembar told me, was “the worst decision any great Supreme Court justice ever made.”

  In essence Holmes said that organized baseball could run itself any way it pleased. No minimum wage laws. No mandatory recognition of unions. No humane treatment of employees. No fair play to athletes. No fair employment. The men who ruled baseball were free to do anything they pleased, up to if not including assault and battery.

  Rickey is hailed, and rightly so, for signing Jackie Robinson. But a hard-eyed look shows us also a Rickey who, more than anyone else, perpetuated baseball feudalism. Of course, contradictions in great leaders are not unusual, but seldom are they so dramatic. Branch Rickey, the Great Emancipator, was also a practicing feudal lord.

  Aside from Landis, the baseball establishment generally came to accept the farm system as an efficient way of doing business. Quite simply, it worked. Only sportswriters made protest. Some called the farm systems “chain gangs,” and one columnist, Jimmy Powers of the New York Daily News, almost drove Rickey out of baseball in 1950. Powers was a resolute reactionary and a closet anti-Semite—in short an unappetizing character—but he championed the salary rights of individual ballplayers with enduring passion. His ferocious clashes with Rickey came later, when Rickey was presiding over the Brooklyn Dodgers. These seemed to blind Powers to the nobi
lity of Rickey’s highest calling: integration. Thus Rickey’s crusade in Brooklyn proceeded without the support of New York’s most popular newspaper. For its part, the New York Times seemed embarrassed by the whole thing.

  James Timothy McCarver, a major leaguer at the age of 18 and later a prominent baseball broadcaster, says candidly, “I don’t have fond memories of Branch Rickey.” Tim and I were lunching at a well-known French restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, and as we splurged on fabulous fish, McCarver went on. “In 1963, after the Army discharged me at Fort Knox, I headed to St. Petersburg to join the Cardinals at Al Lang Field.” (That arena has since been renamed Progressive Energy Park.)

  Most ballplayers in those days held winter jobs and did not work out year-round. Spring training began with endless hours spent swinging against pitching machines that threw only strikes. No batting gloves, either. You wanted to refocus your hitting eye and toughen your hands, bringing them from the blister phase to callus. Stan Musial says that for position players, not pitchers, spring training was mostly about developing calluses. Except for the pitchers and the publicity value, spring training then, and probably now, could be compressed into about 10 days.

  Rickey, 81 years old at the time and a “senior consultant” in his second tour with the Cardinals, sat near the machines, chomping an unlit cigar and repeating the mantra “A good ball, a good ball, a good ball.” He wanted the players to start saying the phrase themselves. If you repeat “a good ball” enough, he believed, you would be unlikely to swing at eye-high fastballs or curves bouncing into the dirt.

  “Spring training was reentry,” McCarver said, “and you were always making little adjustments with your feet and how and where you gripped the bat. I was holding mine a little higher than I should have. During the first week, Rickey called a team ‘sit-down’ to discuss aspects of what he had observed. Looking directly at me, Rickey said that one ‘foolish’ player, who will remain nameless, has been around long enough so that he ought to know how to hold a bat. Rickey continued to glare at me. Nameless? The whole team knew Rickey was talking about me.

  “We had some solid veterans, [third baseman] Ken Boyer and [shortstop] Dick Groat, and I got some teasing about not knowing how to hold a bat. It was highly embarrassing for a young player, which I was.”

  “What did you hit that year?” I asked across a platter of flaky halibut.

  “I believe .289,” McCarver said. “I must have been holding the bat properly some of the time.” He considered briefly. “Rickey’s comment was humiliating and needless.”

  TWO

  CIVIL WRONGS

  BRANCH RICKEY’S SHORTCOMINGS ARE undeniable. Indeed, they caused recurring problems for him both with other baseball executives (notably Walter O’Malley) and with the working press (notably the New York Daily News). But his frugality, his sometime pomposity, his militant piousness and his intellectual elitism shrink in the balance when they are weighed against a monumental deed of moral courage performed during a hellacious time.

  On August 6, 1945, a United States Air Force B-29 named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion killed approximately 140,000 people. One Japanese radio announcer reported, “All living things, human and animal, were seared to death.”

  Three weeks later, on August 28, 1945, during a highly dramatic first meeting, Rickey agreed to sign Jackie Robinson to a minor-league contract in the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, ending so-called “organized” baseball’s all-powerful, unwritten rule against employing black athletes. Major-league baseball had been rigidly segregated for 61 years. It is not entirely hyperbolic to suggest that signing Robinson in the year of Hiroshima was also a nuclear event, exploding in the white-washed corridors of big-time, big-money baseball. Hopefully this began the searing to death of American bigotry.

  More than 40 years after Rickey’s rich life came to an end in a hospital at Columbia, Missouri, the Rickey–Robinson adventure reverberates within baseball and beyond. Many, particularly young people, in the 21st century wonder how arrant prejudice could have persisted for so long in baseball. That is an underlying consideration of this book. Put briefly right here, if baseball was racist, and it was, so also was America. The game is an aspect of American life and mores, and a reflection of both. Like the moon, it simultaneously is a source of light and a reflector.

  Baseball flowered as the segregated national pastime in the United States, the last major enlightened power on earth to renounce black slavery. As we all learned in grade school, the renunciation occurred in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. But—and we were not taught this in any classroom syllabus—segregation and bigotry persisted.

  I remember my own grade school, a sedate Brooklyn prep called Froebel Academy, where each day began in chapel with the reading of a psalm and the singing of stirring Christian hymns.

  Cast thy burden upon the Lord,

  And he shall sustain thee.

  There were no black faces in the chapel, nor on the faculty nor on the sporting fields behind the school building where we played ball. This was the 1930s. A rule, perhaps the rule, in privileged upper-class America was simple enough. Whites only. This approach extended far beyond the paneled walls of the Froebel chapel. In a variety of forms and manners, bigotry suffused the entire nation.

  Occasional widely publicized exceptions appeared, mostly in college football. A great running back, Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, entered Brown University on a scholarship endowed by the Rockefeller family and was named to Walter Camp’s 1916 All-America team. Pollard later coached, played professionally, ran a variety of small businesses and lived to the great age of 92. Currently Brown and the Black Coaches and Administrators cosponsor an annual Fritz Pollard Award, given to the college or professional coach chosen by the BCA as coach of the year. Pollard was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, posthumously, in 2005.

  In 1917 Paul Robeson, later famous as a basso cantate, actor and political activist, made Camp’s team as an end from Rutgers. “A Rutgers dean once called me in,” Robeson told some friends, “and said his grandfather had traveled north from the same part of North Carolina where I had roots. He wondered if my grandfather had traveled the identical route. I told him no, my grandfather did travel from Carolina, but the dean was using the wrong verb. My grandfather didn’t simply travel. He escaped.” Robeson won 15 varsity letters at Rutgers in four sports. He also made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated from Columbia Law School. For a brief period he worked for a prominent law firm, but quit after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. Subsequently he left the law and became an internationally acclaimed performer and later the most memorable Othello of the 20th century.

  Splendid as these men were, they were splendid exceptions. They entered mainstream America through portals in the academic community, which was arguably more enlightened than the nation at large, at least in northern states. When Rickey brought a black man into organized baseball for the season of 1946, he did so against centuries of whites-only tradition that extended far beyond academia, and against wide and ferocious opposition.

  After the chaotic Reconstruction era, no black had sat in the American Senate, no black had ever been appointed to the Supreme Court and neither major political party had even considered (heaven forfend) a black as candidate for the presidency of the United States.

  American schools and colleges largely were segregated. American armed forces, so heroic in defeating the Nazis and the brutal Japanese military, were segregated. Most black soldiers in the Army served in segregated units. Blacks in the Navy were limited to menial work, such as waiting on tables reserved for white officers. It was not until 1943 that the Marine Corps accepted any black volunteers. Still, America’s World War II experience chipped away at the wall of racism. Segregated or not, blacks (including Jackie Robinson) did serve in the armed forces, sometimes heroically. Many returned from milit
ary duty with a sense of legitimacy and worth that had not been there before.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, president from 1933 until his death in the spring of 1945, is rightly remembered as an enlightened liberal. But his actions against American racism were painfully deliberate. Meeting with A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Walter White, director of the NAACP, primarily to discuss the lynching of blacks, Roosevelt insisted that his hands were tied. He could not campaign for a federal antilynching law and his great make-work programs during the Depression, such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, had to remain as rigidly segregated as the military. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” President Roosevelt told the black leaders. “Had I been permitted to choose, then I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America [from economic turmoil that could lead to socialism or even communism]. The segregationist Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”

  Historians generally accept 1968, long after the reign of FDR and three years after Rickey died, as the time when wholesale lynching of blacks finally disappeared from the American scene. A song remains:

  Southern trees bear strange fruit,

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,