Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  The team’s poor play and, more than that, the new huge debt frightened Steve McKeever, now in his 80s, and alarmed the various heirs of Charlie Ebbets. McLaughlin was a haughty character, but he had a good feel for baseball. He knew something had to be done, beyond firing a manager every few seasons.

  Backed by the promissory notes, McLaughlin asked the trustees to let him hire a new chief executive. “With all respect,” he told McKeever, “you’re not a youngster anymore.” The creditor’s request had the force of a loaded pistol.

  McLaughlin talked to Ford Frick, the president of the National League. Frick said he was enjoying his current job. McLaughlin telephoned Branch Rickey in St. Louis. If Rickey’s messianic mission to integrate baseball was stirring, he kept it concealed. You could not reasonably start the integration of baseball in St. Louis, the most overtly racist city in the major leagues. But Rickey said he was content with the Cardinals. He recommended that McLaughlin contact Larry MacPhail, who was doing interesting things in Cincinnati, including, on May 24, 1935, staging the first night game in major-league history. (The Reds defeated the Phillies, 2 to 1.)

  The modern Dodgers can fairly be said to date from January 18, 1938, when Larry MacPhail met with George McLaughlin and laid down his terms for taking over management of the team. He said the old leadership would have to step aside. He and he alone would run the Dodgers. McLaughlin agreed. MacPhail needed continuing support from the bank. Ebbets Field had fallen into disrepair. Some seats were broken. All needed paint. Cement was crumbling in the dugouts. All told, he had to have $200,000 for ballpark improvements. He got it. He had to bring in more baseball talent quickly and that would cost more money. McLaughlin lent him $50,000 to buy the premier first baseman, Dolph Camilli, from the Phillies. A day later Steve McKeever died at the age of 83, supposedly of pneumonia. But the author Bob McGee suggests that what really happened was this: When Old Man McKeever found out that the Dodgers were paying $50,000 for the contract of just one player, he died of shock.

  In June of 1938, MacPhail hired Babe Ruth as first-base coach for a salary of $15,000. At the age of 43, the big man still had power and crowds came to see him drive batting practice fastballs over the screen in right. Brooklyn fans were excited at the prospect of Ruth managing the Dodgers a year later. So was Ruth. When the job went instead to Leo Durocher, Babe Ruth burst into tears. (MacPhail felt Ruth lacked the essential inside baseball shrewdness he felt that managers should have.)

  Later MacPhail cobbled together a $75,000 package to buy Pee Wee Reese from the Boston Red Sox farm team in Louisville. The manager of the Red Sox, aging shortstop Joe Cronin, was happy to see Reese go to another league. And in 1941, putting together a pennant-winning ball club, MacPhail gave $65,000 to the Chicago Cubs for the great second baseman William Jennings Bryan Herman, who answered to Billy.

  As the bank had big bucks, MacPhail had a fine eye. He brought in two seeming journeymen from the American League. Dixie Walker became a National League batting champion. Whitlow Wyatt won 22 games for the Dodgers in 1941. That season Brooklyn won its first pennant in 21 seasons. In 1937, the year before MacPhail arrived, the Dodgers drew 482,481 fans, or about 6,200 for each date at Ebbets Field. In 1941 the Dodgers drew 1,214,910 fans, the highest total in baseball. The team was now averaging more than 15,000 customers for each home date. You could no longer find empty seats close to first base or third near game time at Ebbets Field. When I went now with my father he bought reserved seat tickets in advance. They were priced at $1.65.

  MacPhail brought night baseball and Red Barber to Brooklyn. He experimented with baseballs colored yellow, like today’s tennis balls, and, courting the Brooklyn Irish, he ordered new uniforms of Kelly green. Neither idea worked out but MacPhail was always experimenting, always hustling, and as we learned in Brooklyn, always restless. Some say he was the first to hold a Ladies Day. On some such occasions the women were presented with silk stockings in addition to admission for 10 cents. (Many ladies to be sure brought dates, who had to pay full price, ranging up to $2.20 for a box seat.) “The shrill cries of the female rooters,” wrote Frank Graham in the New York Sun, “pierced the ears of passers-by blocks away.”

  Hokum, grumbled the old-line conservatives who had followed the drab Dodgers of Steve McKeever. But MacPhail and his team so roused the borough that after the Dodgers clinched the 1941 pennant, the Brooklyn Eagle reported that a million fans watched the victory parade along Flatbush Avenue. That would be every second resident of the borough, including shut-ins, newborns and hospital patients. The Eagle was a rooting paper and its number seems absurdly high, but photographic evidence shows that many Brooklynites on the parade route held signs that read: “Pee Wee Reese for President.”

  The year 1942 was a mixed bag. As I’ve noted, the Dodgers won 104 games, but the team lost its best player on July 1, when Harold “Pete” Reiser ran headfirst into the center-field wall in St. Louis and fractured his skull. He was chasing an Enos Slaughter drive. Reiser was never again the same luminous star; Leo Durocher told me that without that injury Pistol Pete “would have been every bit as good as Willie Mays.” At the very least the point is open for debate.

  Given another close pennant race, the fans kept coming to Ebbets Field. For the second straight year, the team drew over a million fans and led the major leagues in attendance. The Yankees, with more than twice as many seats in their stadium, won another pennant, but failed to reach a million and would not until the postwar boom. Small ballpark or no, the Dodgers were the hottest and most profitable franchise in baseball. That Brooklyn was a great baseball town is, quite simply, a matter of public record.

  McLaughlin the fan was delighted to have a winning team in Brooklyn, but McLaughlin the banker was not satisfied with the ledger. It is axiomatic in baseball that the concessions people will generally cheat a little, under-reporting sales of beer and even Cracker Jack. They then quietly pocket some of the proceeds. But McLaughlin detected a great diversion of the cash flow. He brought in a tough collection lawyer, who had offices in the Lincoln Building near Grand Central Terminal, to look into profit and loss. That was how Walter Francis O’Malley came into baseball, sniffing down dollar bills and dimes.

  Each day’s proceeds have to go promptly into a bank. Leaving them at the ballpark is an open invitation to larceny, thieves at midnight quietly ransacking the empty offices until they strike gold. The Dodgers transferred their receipts from Ebbets Field to the Brooklyn Trust Company downtown, a 20-minute van ride, in large gray duffel bags that were unsealed. Who was stealing and how much was stolen never has been precisely defined, but a Dodger official named Jack Collins, who had been drawing a salary of $7,500, abruptly retired during O’Malley’s investigation. He then bought himself a large motel situated on a prime Florida beach with, I suppose, some of my father’s hot dog money.

  “It was so bad,” O’Malley said, “that I couldn’t rectify everything as an outsider. I told McLaughlin that I needed to get inside and become a trustee.” O’Malley was a sure hand with money. He was a season boxholder in Brooklyn, but his interest in baseball seemed no more than casual. McLaughlin lent him $250,000, with which the lawyer bought a 25 percent interest in the Dodgers. The duffel bag pilfering soon stopped. A bit later so did Brooklyn Dodger baseball.

  Before McLaughlin died, in 1967, he had stopped speaking to O’Malley. But the banker certainly experienced what sportswriters would call a “torrid” streak. In a stretch of five years he gave audience to three of the most commanding executives in baseball history, MacPhail, Rickey and O’Malley. All today have plaques in their honor nailed to a wall at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Apparently it was patriotism alone that moved Larry MacPhail to resign as Dodger president, a week before the end of the 1942 season. Suddenly the hottest franchise in baseball faced problems. MacPhail may or may not have paid off the long-standing mortgage. He insisted that he had, but the banker, George McLaughlin, remained a power in the Dodger offices, partly becau
se the heirs of Charlie Ebbets had appointed him trustee for their 50 percent share of Dodger stock.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  BACK IN PITTSBURGH YEARS afterward, Rickey was describing his first meeting with McLaughlin. “Did Larry MacPhail tell you that he paid off the Dodger debt?”

  “He said so on the farm he had in Maryland,” I said.

  “That is not my recollection,” Rickey said. “MacPhail always was better at spending new money than repaying old obligations. His creditors grew whiskers whilst they waited.

  “At any rate I had determined that McLaughlin was critical to the success of my Brooklyn venture and a part of that, surely not all, was proceeding with integration. I believed that the Negro in America was legally but not morally free. I had begun to think that if the right individual, one who possessed great athletic gifts and great self-control, could be located, we could make a difference that should be celebrated.”

  He paused. The Pittsburgh players, who were underperforming before us at Forbes Field, are mostly forgotten now. Gair Allie at shortstop. Curt Roberts at second. Toby Atwell catching. No Coopers-town plaques for these people. These Pirates of 1954 would finish last, 44 games out of first place.

  “I remember that it was a bitter cold January day,” Rickey said. “I can still envision the gray and somewhat forbidding bank building. It was located at the corner of Montague and Clinton streets, not two blocks from my office at 215 Montague, and constructed of gray stone in a style modeled after buildings of the Italian Renaissance.

  “McLaughlin knew baseball as a fan, which is by no means a criticism. He was the financier and a leader of the Brooklyn Roman Catholic Establishment. I was a Midwestern Methodist, a grown-up farm boy, from out of town. But I was learning about the remarkable borough called Brooklyn and I tell you with no false modesty that I knew the game of baseball.

  “I told the banker that for all the Dodgers’ recent success under MacPhail, the team was in a precarious position. The stars MacPhail acquired were not young men. Dolph Camilli, Billy Herman and Whitlow Wyatt were moving toward the downward side of their careers. My ideal team, as I may have told you, consists of youth at the eight positions, youth with speed that is a factor offensively and defensively. But I retain a preference for older pitchers. They know the craft and are possessed of poise. ‘Have I ever put together an ideal team?’ you may ask. The answer is ‘Not up to this time.’

  “But the Cardinals of ’42 came reasonably close. We had outstanding position players in Slaughter, Musial, Marion and Walker Cooper. We had experienced pitchers like Mort Cooper and Max Lanier. Not only did that team win 106 games, they simply blew away the mighty Yankees in a five-game World Series. Simply blew ’em away.” To emphasize his point Rickey blew a thundercloud of cigar smoke into the already polluted Pittsburgh summer air.

  “All well and good for St. Louis and myself, but now I was in Brooklyn. I told George McLaughlin that I would have to work very hard with a reasonable budget or else when peace returned the Cardinals would dominate the National League for many years.”

  “I am going to have to expand the Dodger farm system,” Rickey told McLaughlin. “I want to hire the best scouts in the country.”

  McLaughlin absorbed Rickey’s brilliant analysis with some surprise. Jeopardy? Not really, although Rickey would be spending a lot of the bank’s money. The Brooklyn team had just won 104 games. But as the banker considered them with some thought, Rickey’s points made sense. “But one thing I’m going to urge,” he said after a pause, “is economy. MacPhail was terrible at thrift. That’s why we are still having to carry Dodger debt on our books. We want you to win. We also want the ball club to be solvent. That’s why I brought in a tough lawyer, Walter O’Malley, to keep an eye on spending.”

  “I’m glad you brought in this fellow O’Malley,” Rickey said, probably for the only time in his long lifetime.

  During the seven years in which the Daily News attacked Rickey as a tightwad, no one at the tabloid appeared to know or care that he was operating under directions from a bank.

  He dropped his real bombshell almost casually. “In order to be ready for the end of the war, we are going to have to beat the bushes, and that might include a Negro player or two.”

  According to papers filed by one of Rickey’s aides at the Library of Congress, McLaughlin’s eyebrows shot up. The Brooklyn Irish Catholic Establishment was just emerging from a decade in which one of its hallmarks was raw bigotry, specifically street-corner anti-Semitism. Everywhere people quoted the high priest of prejudice, Father Charles Coughlin, who insisted that all rich Jews were dangerous international bankers and that all poor Jews were dangerous Communists. But by this point, to paraphrase Bob Dylan from another period, the times were a-changing. (Walter O’Malley’s special affection for me hardly characterized the behavior of an anti-Semite.)

  McLaughlin was a businessman, not an ideologue. More blacks were moving into Brooklyn. They could swell attendance figures at Ebbets Field. The borough was heavily New Deal Democrat. This was not Atlanta or Birmingham. Rickey’s revolutionary plan could work and open a large new market. Finally McLaughlin spoke. “If you are doing this to improve the ball club,” he said, “go ahead. But if you’re doing it for the emancipation of the Negro, then forget it.”

  Rickey could not remember his response. The proper, but probably dangerous answer would have been “Both.” Instead he pressed forward. Could McLaughlin quickly arrange a meeting for him with the board of directors? He would like their approval on his overall approach and particularly for his idea of bringing in a Negro.

  A week later the directors and possibly Walter O’Malley met for lunch in a spectacularly inappropriate setting on Central Park South, the fervidly racist New York Athletic Club. The New York AC categorically barred Jews from membership. Admitting a Negro was unthinkable. I brushed up against the club on several early assignments from the Herald Tribune, where a press card temporarily trumped bigotry. At one point I asked a club official, John F. X. Condon, what the club policy was on Jews and blacks. “We don’t accept either Jews or black as members,” he said in a genial tone, “any more than we would accept dogs.”

  According to papers in the Library of Congress, the luncheon gathering with Rickey included McLaughlin and his banking associate, George Barnewell; Joseph Gilleaudeau, representing the interests of the Ebbets family; and James Mulvey, a forceful executive at MGM, representing the McKeevers. (Eight years later McKeever’s daughter Ann would marry Ralph Branca.) No record exists of an O’Malley presence, although he later claimed that he was there. It became important to him in later years to maintain that he was prominent in the decision to integrate, which he was, but it is reasonable to doubt that he was present at the creation. I almost always could catch Buzzie Bavasi’s misstatements. Walter was a more difficult case. Whenever I pressed him harder than he wanted to be pressed, he turned jovial and announced, “You have to remember that only half the lies the Irish tell are true.” Although he personally disliked Jackie Robinson—“an inveterate seeker of personal publicity,” O’Malley once called him—he was proud that the Dodgers had integrated the game and deeply envious of the credit that eventually fell like manna onto the shoulders of Branch Rickey.

  That summer day in Pittsburgh, 1954, Rickey told me that he was aware of wintry chill between Gilleaudeau and Mulvey. The Ebbets and McKeever families never reconciled. “I wanted to avoid a situation at that luncheon where if one man said yes, the other would automatically say no,” Rickey said. “Barnewell was most helpful in steering away from that. ‘We,’ Barnewell said, referring to all of the various people in Dodger management, ‘probably haven’t tapped the Negro market enough.’ I followed up along those lines being very careful not to sound either too zealous or too ideological. Courting the Negro market would simply be good business. After a while and without any real debate everyone agreed that I could go ahead with my grand plan.”

  “Were you aware that the New Yo
rk Athletic Club barred Jews and Negroes from its ranks?”

  “Not at that time. But over the next few years, I gave myself an intense course in racism and bigotry in America. I would not attend a meeting at the New York Athletic Club today.”

  Now Rickey began to resemble the legendary horseman who rode off in all four directions at once. He read Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish socialist who wrote on the discrepancy between America’s stated ideals and its actual treatment of blacks. He learned that in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson had written, “all men are created free and equal.” Benjamin Franklin crossed out the word “free.” Rickey thought that was ironic. Jefferson was a slaveholder. Franklin was not.

  Rickey wanted the process of baseball integration to proceed without violence, and he began studying the passive resistance methods of Mohandas Gandhi. More than once he cited one of Gandhi’s observations:

  “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the

  good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

  Overhearing that, Tom Meany, a very sharp baseball writer for the remarkable and forgotten newspaper PM, nicknamed Rickey himself “the Mahatma.” Except in the Daily News, that wonderfully apt nickname stuck.

  Now the directors were on board, but what was to be done about Negro players during spring training in the South? Where would they eat; where would they live? Despite its winter influx of tourists from the north, derisively known as snowbirds, Florida was as racist as Alabama, particularly small-town Florida, where so many exhibition games were played. How should he prepare the other Dodgers for playing alongside a Negro? He might have to do some evangelical preaching in the clubhouse. The gifted Dodger sportscaster Walter Lanier “Red” Barber was a proud Southerner, raised among fierce racist traditions. Faced with black Dodgers, would Barber quit? Other teams were eager to bid for his services, which, as I’ve mentioned, included such homespun Southern phrases as “tearin’ up the ol’ pea patch.” That meant that the Dodgers were rallying.