Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

And Simon Legree stared up beneath,

  And cracked his heels, and ground his teeth:

  AND WENT DOWN TO THE DEVIL.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  And the Devil said to Simon Legree:

  “I like your style, so wicked and free.

  Come sit and share my throne with me,

  And let us bark and revel.”

  And there they sit and gnash their teeth,

  And each one wears a hop-vine wreath.

  They are matching pennies and shooting craps,

  They are playing poker and taking naps.

  And old Legree is fat and fine:

  He eats the fire, he drinks the wine—

  Blood and burning turpentine—

  DOWN, DOWN WITH THE DEVIL

  Legree was fictive. The actual gatekeeper at baseball’s racial barrier, its impenetrable cotton curtain, did not drink burning turpentine, but neither was he a pussyfooting slouch. “The Judge,” wrote J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the Sporting News from 1914 to 1962, “was a tempestuous character who led a tempestuous life from the time he took his first breath in Millville, Ohio. There was never anything prosaic about him.” A. L. Sloan, political editor of the Chicago Herald-American, wrote, “The Judge was always headline news. He was a great showman, theatrical in appearance, with his sharp jaw and shock of white hair, and people always crowded into his courtroom, knowing there would be something going on. There were few dull moments.”

  This tempestuous, theatrical showman-judge was, of course, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He was the first commissioner and the most absolute commissioner ever. Landis did not want black players appearing in organized ball. Stories persist that in 1940, when the Phillies constantly were losing games and money, someone proposed dumping the whole bumbling squad and replacing them with gifted players from the Negro Leagues. Landis is said to have killed the plan. He had the power to throw anyone—player, owner, umpire—clear out of organized baseball if he felt the expulsion was “in the best interests of the game.” Talk about an elastic clause. Landis was prosecutor, judge and jury all in one. After Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. exempted baseball from the antitrust laws governing business in 1922, there was no appeal from a Landis decision—no appeal, no protest, no escape except perhaps to slit one’s throat.

  I am not sure about the black-ballplayers-for-Philadelphia story. Supposedly the would-be buyer was Bill Veeck, a friend of mine for more than 25 years. I visited him often at his home near Easton, Maryland, and we stayed up late many evenings talking baseball. Bill never mentioned Philadelphia. But he did tell me that in 1939, when he was running the Milwaukee Brewers in the Triple A American Association, he decided to sign a few black players to strengthen his club. Veeck dispatched scouts to Negro League games and Landis, who had more sources than J. Edgar Hoover, found out about the plan. He had long known Veeck’s late father, once president of the Chicago Cubs. “Our families go back a ways,” Landis told Veeck on a long-distance telephone line. “It would pain me greatly, Bill, to have to throw you out of baseball. But if you even try to sign a colored ballplayer, that’s what I will do. Out of baseball, Bill. For life!”

  I asked Veeck, “What did you say?”

  “Not much. Just thank you for your time.”

  Landis was a complex and quintessential Midwesterner, the sixth child born to Mary and Abraham Landis in Millville, a small community in a southwestern corner of Ohio, centered around, predictably, a grist mill. It was less than 100 miles from Branch Rickey’s birthplace, Stockdale.

  Abraham Landis, a German immigrant, was a surgeon in the Union Army grievously injured during Sherman’s March to the Sea. At the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in northwestern Georgia, Landis was dressing the wounds of someone he recalled as “a beardless, blue-clad infantryman” when a nearly spent Confederate cannonball ricocheted off a tree and struck him full on one leg. The iron ball crushed flesh and shattered bone; another Army doctor had to amputate the leg. Curiously, Landis chose to memorialize this agonizing event by naming his fifth son after the battle that crippled him, Kenesaw Mountain. (Somewhere between Georgia and Ohio, Dr. Landis dropped a letter out of “Kennesaw.”)

  The injury made it impossible for Dr. Landis to make the rounds of a rural medical practice and he moved to Logansport, Indiana, and bought a farm. Ken Landis remembered a happy boyhood on the farm performing chores and, at every opportunity, playing baseball. In time he played for and managed the Logansport High team. After a smattering of courses at the University of Cincinnati, Landis studied law in Chicago at Union College of Law (now the Northwestern University School of Law).

  Sometime after graduation Ken Landis found a position as assistant to Grover Cleveland’s secretary of state, Walter Gresham. The young lawyer was hard-driving, patriotic and bright. When Gresham became ill, he designated Landis to sit in for him at meetings of the presidential cabinet. The future judge was on his way.

  Following Gresham’s death, Landis moved back to Chicago, where he developed a flourishing law practice. Then, in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt rewarded the bright young man—Landis was not yet 40 years old—by appointing him a federal judge. Landis became famous two years later when he found against Standard Oil in an antitrust trial and fined the mammoth company an unprecedented sum: $29 million. (On appeal the verdict was set aside.) He later presided over the trial of Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight champion, who was accused of transporting a white woman across a state line “for immoral purposes.” An all-white jury convicted Johnson. Landis sentenced him to prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

  He had always been a baseball fan and claimed to have played semi-pro ball as a teenager. But his first formal connection with organized baseball came in the courtroom. The Federal League was founded in 1912 and in 1914 began playing a full schedule of major-league baseball in direct competition with the National and American Leagues. Eight teams, from the Brooklyn Tip-Tops to the Kansas City Packers, competed and at least five Hall of Famers appeared in Federal League uniforms: Charles Albert “Chief” Bender with the Baltimore Terrapins; Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, St. Louis Terriers; Bill McKechnie, Indianapolis Hoosiers; Eddie Plank, Terriers; Edd Roush, Newark Peppers; and Joe Tinker, Chicago Whales. This was and is the most serious challenge in the annals to the monopoly of the National and American Leagues.

  It was expensive starting the league—think building new ballparks—and after beginning, the Feds hoped for some mergers with the established ball clubs. Getting nowhere, the Feds filed an antitrust suit, which led to the court of the old trustbuster, Judge K. M. Landis. In this instance, Landis did no trust busting, but let the case languish. The Federal League folded. Landis had shown himself to be a friend of Establishment baseball.

  When later it came to light that seven or eight Chicago White Sox had taken bribes and dumped the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, the country reacted with profound shock. This comes across in a passage from Scott Fitzgerald’s signature novel, The Great Gatsby:

  “Who is he, anyhow, an actor?”

  “No.”

  “A dentist?”

  “Meyer Wolfsheim? [In reality, Arnold Rothstein.] No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

  “Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.

  The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

  “How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

  “He just saw the opportunity.”

  “Why isn’t he in jail?”

  “They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”

  Nothing excluding earthquakes or tsun
amis at ballparks near the sea can be worse for baseball than gamblers tinkering with final scores. Staged, which is to say fixed, professional wrestling matches could be advertised in many states only as exhibitions. By contrast, big-league ballgames were contests. Take away that element, the contest, the struggle to and fro grinding down to the final out, the final pitch, and you kill an essential part of baseball’s appeal. Suspicions of the White Sox’s effort surfaced even as the World Series was being played. Christy Mathewson sat next to Ring Lardner in the Chicago press box on October 1 as the Reds won the first game, 9 to 1. On Lardner’s scorecard Mathewson silently circled White Sox plays that he thought looked suspicious. Then Lardner wrote a scathing song that he sang two days later after a few drinks of Prohibition whiskey in a Pullman car headed for Cincinnati: Based on the popular tune “Blowing Bubbles,” Lardner’s lyrics went like this:

  I’m forever blowing ballgames,

  Pretty ballgames in the air.

  I come from Chi—

  I never try.

  But the gamblers treat us fair.

  Contemporaries said Lardner had a strong and on-key baritone voice. That day his voice and lyric carried far beyond the rattling Pullman car in which he was traveling.

  Word of the fix spread and eight White Sox players were indicted, including the iconic Shoeless Joe Jackson, who somehow managed to bat .375 in a Series he was dumping. Thoroughly alarmed, the 16 club owners hastily agreed to form a commission of non-baseball men to supervise the game and, to be sure, restore public faith in the integrity of baseball. Asked to join the commission, Landis declined. But, he said, he would accept an appointment as the sole commissioner. Frightened, the owners readily agreed.

  Further, Landis said, he would have to have unlimited authority to act “in the best interests of baseball.” He would be a one-man arbitration panel.

  In virtually a single voice, the owners said, “Yes, Judge.”

  And finally, Landis said, the decisions he made could not be appealed.

  The owners, actually an arrogant lot, were in trouble and they knew they were in trouble. They submitted to Landis’s autocratic terms without a whimper. This was just about the greatest handoff of power ever until 10 years later when Adolf Hitler took over the German Reichstag.

  On August 2, 1921, a hometown jury acquitted the Chicago Eight. The ballplayers and the jurors then joined in a roaring alcoholic celebration. Next day, a cold-sober Landis banned the eight for life. He said that banning them was essential if baseball’s favorable image was to be restored.

  Soon sportswriters began calling Landis “Czar” and his reign lasted 24 years, until his death in 1944 at the age of 78. He wanted no funeral, no memorial, no flowers. “He was, I think, an atheist,” wrote J. G. Taylor Spink. Whatever, Landis wanted to be remembered only for his life. It was in many ways an exceptional life, but it was marred and it is marred by racism.

  “Certainly in many instances Landis made important decisions that favored baseball’s working men, the ballplayers,” Lester Rodney said at our final meeting. “Certainly with the New Deal and World War II the times were changing. At the Worker we prepared petitions to open the game to blacks. More than a million people signed them. Figuratively those petitions were dumped on Landis’s desk. He was unmoved. The only end to his opposition to blacks in baseball was death. His own death. Within one year of Landis dying, our long campaign bore fruit. Rickey signed Jackie Robinson.”

  These intersections of viewpoints are no less than remarkable. The Psalm Singer (Rickey). The Rigid Self-Righteous Judge (Landis). The Brooklyn Communist (Lester Rodney). Jackie Robinson summarized the situation when he testified before Congress on July 18, 1949.

  “The fact that it is a Communist who denounced injustice in the courts, police brutality and a lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges. Negroes were stirred up before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the Party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared as well.”

  “A profound statement,” I said to him years later.

  “For a second baseman,” said Jackie Robinson.

  SIX

  A MEETING FOR THE AGES

  HY TURKIN, A SHORT, SLIGHT, BESPECTACLED tabloid sportswriter, was what we used to call a “Figure Filbert.” He was a numbers man, forever considering and reconsidering the statistics and measurements that to some (mostly other numbers men) define baseball. Hy Turkin and Allan Roth, a supremely gifted Canadian statistician whom Branch Rickey brought to Brooklyn, were the founders of modern baseball numerology, subsequently practiced by Leonard Koppett, Bill James and such other numbers folk as John Thorn and Alan Schwarz. But the numbers folk are not universally popular. One day when Koppett arrived in a press box carrying a satchel, the columnist Jimmy Cannon snarled and said, “What you got in that bag, Koppett? Decimal points?”

  The numbers were and are such stuff as on-base percentage, at bats per home run, fielding percentage; the arithmetic of baseball fills many volumes. One numeric rule, of particular interest in New York, stated that no outfield fence in a major-league ballpark could be closer to home plate than 250 feet. The thought obviously was to eliminate pop-fly home runs. Officials of the New York Giants maintained that the right-field foul pole in the old Polo Grounds was 257 feet distant. But so many lazy fly balls reached the seats that numbers of us became suspicious. Hy Turkin was the man who took action. One morning in 1950 he showed up at the Polo Grounds with a yardstick. Turkin crouched at home plate and began measuring as he slouched his way out toward right field. He had just reached first base when three husky ballpark cops appeared and blocked his way. Under orders from the Giant management, they confiscated Turkin’s yardstick and escorted him off the field. There were no laser range finders back in 1950s, so the actual distance to the right-field foul pole at the Polo Grounds remains a mystery, like the identity of Jack the Ripper or the true founder of the city of Rome.

  During the 1940s, Turkin crossed paths with a cornet player named S. (for Shirley) C. Thompson who had played in John Sousa’s famous marching band. Thompson was a professional musician, but almost all his spare time was devoted to baseball, its people and its history. In 1951 a sports book publisher, A. S. Barnes, issued the groundbreaking first Baseball Encyclopedia. It had been assembled by Thompson and Turkin. The book purported to contain the name of every man who had ever played major-league baseball, the teams for which he played, his positions, his birthplace and birth date and his vital statistics, good (home runs) and bad (errors). Lowell Pratt, the president of Barnes, said the work was so complete that he would personally pay $50 to anyone who came up with the name of a big-league player, living or dead, who was missing from the encyclopedia. (As I remember it, Pratt had to pay off only eight times.)

  Rickey made no secret of his aversion to the tabloid press—this would cost him dearly—but the bespectacled little numbers man from the New York Daily News interested him and they developed a relationship. Rickey discussed with Turkin, as he did with very few, a bit of the selection process that led to Jackie Robinson.

  According to Turkin, Rickey’s first choice was a Cuban infielder named Silvio Garcia. “He hits for power and average,” one of Rickey’s scouts reported in 1945. “He runs well and his arm is unbelievable. When he’s playing third and throws to first, it’s as if an invisible hand at the pitchers’ mound threw the ball again. That’s how hard this Garcia flings it.”

  Walter O’Malley picked up the story from there. “I was the Dodger lawyer,” O’Malley told me years afterward at a luncheon in Los Angeles. “I knew in legal confidentiality about Rickey’s plan to integrate, and of course I approved. He said the scouts had found a superb player named Garcia. He told me to fly to Havana and do a background check. We understood that the first black would have to be a great ballplayer but also a man of character. I’d had some dealings with one of the leading Cuban Jewish families, the Maduros. They were active in a whole lot of areas, f
rom cane sugar to baseball.

  “I flew to Havana on a lumbering old DC-3. All the windows were painted black. This was just after the war and the windows were blackened to conceal the plane from anti-aircraft fire from German ships and submarines.

  “Roberto Maduro, a good ballplayer in his own right, helped me out. He had a file on Silvio Garcia and it wasn’t pretty. First, Garcia was in trouble with Cuban selective service. It looked as though he might be accused of draft dodging. Second, his personal health records showed that he had been treated for venereal disease.

  “I thanked my friend Bobby Maduro, and flew home to New York in another plane with blackened windows. After I reported my findings to Rickey, our search for the right player moved elsewhere.”

  Subsequently, in 1949, Garcia signed with the Sherbrooke Athlétiques of the Provincial League in Quebec. This league was “independent,” not affiliated with so-called organized baseball. There, Garcia tore up the turf of Canada. He led the league in homers, doubles and runs batted in. He hit .365. Finally, in 1952, Garcia broke a color barrier in organized ball playing infield for the Miami Beach Flamingos of the Class B Florida International League. But by then time was eroding his great skills.