Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  On a light news day in the winter of 1954, I enlisted the New York Herald Tribune’s telephone recording room—usually used for overseas dispatches—to cut a 331⁄3 LP disc while Branch Rickey, the closest thing baseball had to Winston Churchill, talked and answered questions that I tossed at him. I am setting down the story as it ran. What we get is a vivid sense of Rickey’s command of the language. What we do not get, for reasons that will presently become clear, are his ardent views on racism.

  “RICKEY ON THE RECORD”

  New York Herald Tribune, February 14

  The mystifying speech patterns of Branch Rickey, a man who generally prompts reporters to throw away their notebooks in despair, were captured yesterday on a record connected to a telephone recording machine. The record was not thrown away.

  I reached Rickey in Fort Pierce, Florida, where he was awaiting the opening of the Pittsburgh Pirates spring camp. The Pirates have finished a distant last for the past two seasons and Rickey was questioned on prospects. Here, verbatim from the record, are the questions and Rickey’s answers.

  Q: Are the Pirates going to do better this year?

  Rickey: I know a rosebush is going to bloom on the 18th of May and do it nearly every year. And it’s all green today and three days later it’s in full color. Well, I don’t control a baseball club’s development the way nature does a rosebush. But I know damn well—pardon me, very well—that these boys physically fit who can run and throw and have power are going to come to some kind of competitive excellence. And I don’t know whether it’s the 18th of May and I don’t know when it’s going to come, but it’s my job to get it to come all at the same time. I’ve got to take all these darts of uncomplimentary remarks because of youth movement or an old man movement. I’ve got to take a lot of punishment but I guess I’m old enough to do it.

  Q: When do you think the Pirates will move out of last place?

  Rickey: I’m not too mindful about moving up in the second division. I have no desire to finish anywhere except first place. I would much rather finish in eighth place with a club I knew was going all the way, than I would in second place with a stand-patter. That’s fact and I’ve been criticized for that viewpoint in Pittsburgh. But at my age I’m not interested in being in second place, but I know I have to pass second to get to first and, of course, I’m anxious to get out of the hole: I don’t want to be in last place. I’d rather be in seventh or fifth. I don’t mean to be ridiculous and say I’m not interested in being in fifth any more than I am in being eighth. I’d rather be in seventh with a team that’s going to be in fifth.

  Q: Oh, I see. Well, how long do you expect it to be before you do for Pittsburgh what you did for Brooklyn and St. Louis?

  Rickey: I had a worse situation in Pittsburgh than I had in Brooklyn. We’ve been in last place on merit. The crowd I started with in Brooklyn, had [Arky] Vaughan, [Billy] Herman, Pee Wee Reese and Dixie Walker and three or four pretty good pitchers and twelve 10-year men were there. There was a nucleus to build around. And I had something in St. Louis. I had Rogers Hornsby, a great ballplayer. In Pittsburgh I didn’t have a nucleus. It took me three or four years in Brooklyn. It took me six years in St. Louis and I’ve really had two here now because the first year we just had what we had. To tell you that it’s going to be another year or two years, to put a dateline on it—I can’t do it. I can’t tell you. We’re on a long-distance phone and you’re paying the bill. You ought to stop me when I get talking.

  Q: No, no. You’re being quite eloquent.

  Rickey: Heaven’s sakes, no eloquence. I need help. If you know how to help a tail-end ball club, come down here. I’ll pay you more than you’re making. I don’t care what it is.

  Q: Why not start with another Jackie Robinson?

  Rickey: Oh, well, goodness is relative. If I compare it with player X on the Brooklyn club and player Y on the Milwaukee club, why my boy might not be as good. But there are some instances where I wouldn’t trade them, and I have a number of boys that I really like very much. The Army has hurt us more than it does Brooklyn or Milwaukee or any great team because the players I lose to the Army are men I could use. The men they lose to the Army are men that would be there for four years before they could use them. And I am hurt by that. But in spite of that I’ve got a number of boys that are reporting here that I think are good. We have half a dozen young catchers and we’ve got seven first basemen and our pitching, we have some good prospects there but they’re young. They’re too young. I like old pitchers. A lot of people think I want young players all the time. Why, heaven’s sake, I want good men. I don’t care how old they are if they can run and do things, the older the better.

  Q: Are you interested in trading?

  Rickey: Yes. But I don’t anticipate any deals before the 15th of April. I want to look over everyone I have first and then, the other fellow doesn’t come up with a sense of need until he has seen something of his team, too. You know, now, there are seven clubs in the National League who expect to win the pennant. I don’t ever make any excuses on that myself. We’ve got an ideal training camp here for a unit camp—that is, for a one-club thing. It’s not a Vero Beach. That, as an organizational camp, is in a class by itself. Last year we didn’t play as many exhibition games as we do this year but, as a matter of fact, a great deal of good comes out of not playing games. The compensation of games, however, is overall good. Where you don’t play games if your instructors are minded to do it, they can do a great deal of work in the field of teaching skills, techniques and individual improvements.

  Q: Will the Pirates be improved?

  Rickey: Yes, sir. In all departments. They’re a year older and a year better. I’ve been frank with you. Very frank. Come see me any time. I do believe I’d like to have you to work for me.

  The elapsed time of the conversation was 12 minutes. The telephone bill was $6.90. Even Vince Kellett, the chief editorial auditor at the Herald Tribune and a man of surpassing frugality, agreed that the money was well spent.

  Myself, I wonder to this day why I didn’t ask about Rickey’s heroic journey toward integration. But then I recall a cold reality. Robert B. Cooke, a smooth and handsome Yale man who was sports editor at the Tribune, had told me over a drink that by hiring a Negro “Rickey has done more to damage baseball than any man who ever lived.” Cooke developed his point with great intensity. He had been captain of the Yale hockey team in 1936, he said, and he drove his shots as hard as any New York Ranger. But the Rangers were staffed by Canadians who “had the legs to skate Americans clear off the ice.”

  In baseball, Cooke said, Negroes had the legs, too, and they would soon run every white man out of the game. These words were spoken with passion and, as Sartre wrote, you cannot argue away a passion. If I focused my recorded interview—a great novelty at the time—on racism and injustice, Cooke might have killed the entire piece. He had that power. I certainly could have argued, but I was not ready for a career crisis that February day. Given my friendship with Robinson, my admiration of Rickey and my own impassioned support of integration, a career crisis with Cooke was inevitable. But I didn’t know that at the time.

  And then, perhaps whimsically, suppose I had taken Rickey up on his offer to join him with the Pirates for more than the Tribune was paying me—at that time a less than overwhelming $6,240 a year. I might have evolved into a professional baseball man rather than an author. In short, I might never again have had to change a typewriter ribbon. But across the next four seasons, the Pirates finished seventh once and eighth three times. Roberto Clemente joined the team in 1955, but other Rickey seedlings were slow to grow.

  Given that maturation rate, there was no job security in Pittsburgh, not even for Rickey himself, and had I accepted his offer I might also have ended up unemployed amid the steel mills and the coal towns of western Pennsylvania, telling my sorrows to the foam atop a mug of Rolling Rock beer.

  “And you would have found,” said Dick Young, of the New York Daily News, the kin
g of caustic sportswriters, “that the real problem out there goes beyond baseball.

  “In Pittsburgh, all the pretty women are pregnant.”

  THREE

  COMING TO BROOKLYN

  I FIRST ENCOUNTERED BRANCH RICKEY (IN THE flesh) at a wintertime assembly at Erasmus Hall, a venerable Brooklyn high school, where he came to speak. At the time Erasmus was sharply split into divisions. In the academic wing I studied Latin over four years, from grammar to Vergil’s towering epic, The Aeneid. (“Arma virumque cano. I sing of arms and the man . . .”) In nearby classrooms, young women entered in the “commercial” branch of Erasmus Hall learned shorthand and typing. The place, some 4,000 students strong, was half prep and half secretarial school.

  A group of “Flat Bush gentlemen” founded Erasmus Hall in 1786 as a private academy affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. Tuition was a then formidable six guineas a year. The new school took its name from the Dutch renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), who prepared Greek and Latin editions of the New Testament and was sometimes described as Prince of the Humanists.

  Later Erasmus Hall went public, but for many years the academic—as opposed to the commercial—division of Erasmus Hall retained a strong classical element. In my time there we were required to study the life and theology of Erasmus and I was able to complete my four years of Latin under a remarkable polymath, Dr. Harry Wedeck. In one of my few—very few—academic triumphs, Dr. Wedeck awarded me a gold medal as the premier Latin student in the class of 1944. To this day, thanks to Erasmus and Dr. Wedeck, I can quote lines from Caesar, Cicero and, as above, Vergil. More than 65 years after graduating, I find myself listed among the school’s distinguished alums, along with Sid Luckman, Mae West, Mickey Spillane, Bernard Malamud, Barbara Stanwyck, Susan Hayward, Barbra Streisand and Moe Howard, one of the Three Stooges. Quite a gang.

  When Rickey came to Brooklyn in 1943, first living in modest quarters in the Clinton Hill section, he plunged himself into community affairs. To his pleasure, he discovered that the borough consisted of a series of individual neighborhoods, some with a decided ethnic character, and many with distinctive names. Bay Ridge, Bedford Stuyvesant, Bensonhurst, Brownsville, Coney Island, Crown Heights, East New York, Flatbush, Fort Greene, Park Slope, Sheepshead Bay and Williamsburg were (and are) some subsections contained in the merry old borough of Brooklyn. “I like the mix of neighborhoods,” Rickey said. “To my mind it is a microcosm of America at large.”

  At that winter assembly back in the wartime year of 1944, Rickey talked about the future of a world that would soon be at peace, while mentioning that Dodger season tickets were now on sale. Would the future belong to the scientists or to the artists? That was his topic. Few knew then of nuclear bombs or the Holocaust. As Rickey spoke he held a jar full of raisins and nuts, which he shook occasionally. At the end of the talk Rickey said, “Remember now, tell your parents to order their season tickets right away for the best choice of seats. And, oh yes, about the future; scientists or artists? Who can say? But if you observed closely, whenever I shook the jar you learned something useful. No matter how hard I shook that jar, the nuts always came out on top.” (So much for Rickey as humorless.)

  I found myself fascinated by Rickey, a pudgy sort with massive eyebrows, as I had been by only one other speaker at an Erasmus assembly. The great World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker (1890–1973) appeared and talked passionately about the ordeal that led to his book, Seven Came Through. On a secret military mission during World War II, Rickenbacker rode aboard a B-17 that had to ditch in a remote patch of the South Pacific. Quickly taking command, Rickenbacker got the eight survivors onto a raft, where, before being rescued, they drifted on an endless sea for 24 days. One man died. The others subsisted on rainwater and such food as they could find. Once, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker’s head. The bird became dinner for seven. Rickenbacker told his story of courage, discipline and luck with magnificent gusto.

  Dodger survival was a different matter, and I don’t recall Rickey saying much about the team. The great ball club that I later called the Boys of Summer at this point was no more than a gleam in Rickey’s eye. Pee Wee Reese, Carl Erskine and Duke Snider were in the Navy. Gil Hodges was serving in the Marine Corps. Carl Furillo and Billy Cox were in the Army. There wasn’t much talent left to perform at Ebbets Field.

  Dixie Walker, the popular right fielder, batted .357 and led the league, beating out Stan Musial by 10 points. But the pitching was dreary. Curt Davis, a lean side-arming right-hander and the best of the wartime staff, won 10 games. He lost 11. No Dodger starting pitcher finished above .500. The team dropped 91 games and finished in seventh place, just a game and a half ahead of the team sportswriters called the Phutile Phillies.

  On one painful western swing, the Dodgers performed so poorly that Roscoe McGowen of the New York Times composed a parody of the wartime song “Bless ’Em All.” McGowen’s Dodger version went “Lose ’Em All.” Rickey pretended to be unconcerned and constantly touted questionable prospects, particularly a young infielder from New Jersey named Eddie Miksis. But Miksis couldn’t hit much, even against wartime pitching, which moved McGowen to compose another bit of caustic doggerel. This one began:

  Miksis

  Will fix us,

  Said Rickey, the boss . . .

  Over nine big-league seasons, Eddie Miksis would bat .236, but not even a chain of dismaying Dodgers could depress me in 1944. Moving from poetry to hyperbole, Rickey promoted at least four other infielders as “the next Pee Wee Reese.” Here are their names, the club to which Rickey sold their contracts and their lifetime big-league batting averages:

  ♦ Claude Corbitt, Cincinnati Reds, .243

  ♦ Tommy Brown, Philadelphia Phillies, .241

  ♦ Bob Ramazotti, Chicago Cubs, .230

  ♦ Bobby Morgan, Cubs, .233

  Looking back, Rickey’s hustling of pseudo Reeses may seem amusing, shipping inferior players to other teams, also inferior. But as I have mentioned Rickey pocketed 15 percent of each sale and to O’Malley that fiscal leak out of the Dodger bank account was a serious matter. O’Malley had advanced from Dodger club lawyer to part owner on stock he purchased with a loan from George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company. O’Malley, called the Big Oom, quietly fumed at what he considered Rickey’s unconscionable double-dipping. Sometime back then—there is no exact date—O’Malley began scheming to take over the Dodgers for himself.

  As a young man I knew nothing of the byzantine Brooklyn front office. Youth is about hope, and I understood Rickey’s history of building championship teams in St. Louis. So I hoped and trusted that given time he would bring a consistent winning team to my hometown, which up until then had zero history of consistent winners. While the New York ball clubs, the Yankees and the Giants, became ongoing powerhouses, success for the Dodgers had been rare and episodic. (The team was then known as the Robins after their portly, genial manager, Wilbert Robinson. The Dodger nickname became popular during the 1930s.) Only two pennants between 1900 and 1940, and after each a dismal loss in the World Series. In Game 2 of the 1916 Series, which the Boston Red Sox won in five games, a young Red Sox left-hander defeated the Dodgers, two to one, in 14 innings. His name was George Herman Ruth. During the 1920 Series, which Cleveland won handily, a Dodger pitcher named Clarence Mitchell hit into an unassisted triple play. Next time up Mitchell hit into a double play. “Two swings, five outs,” my father remarked in his droll way. “Hard to do.”

  Rickey was always intensely serious about religion, and when he came to Brooklyn in 1943, he found his new house of worship within a few blocks of 215 Montague Street, the Dodger offices. That was the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, at 75 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, a vibrant and historic Congregational institution founded in 1847.

  Henry Ward Beecher, the most prominent American pastor of the 19th century, long presided at the Plymouth Church, which became a bastion of abolitionism. (His sister
, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.) Abraham Lincoln twice worshiped at the Plymouth Church. It is the only church in what is now New York City that Lincoln ever attended. Beecher invited a dazzling roster to speak from his pulpit: Clara Barton, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Thackeray, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. But across the years Beecher remained the star. Mark Twain described his preaching style like this: “Sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.”

  Beecher was also given to pomposity, which led Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to compose a witty limerick:

  The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher

  Called a hen a most elegant creature.

  The hen, pleased with that,

  Laid an egg in his hat,

  And thus did the hen reward Beecher