Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  How would the rival owners react not to a theory but to a reality, a black man wearing a Brooklyn Dodger uniform? What about the press? Aside from Lester Rodney, the Communist columnist, only a few, Dan Parker in the New York Daily Mirror, Shirley Povich in the Washington Post, had announced themselves as pro-integration. “I was busy with the day-to-day details of running the Brooklyn club,” Rickey said, “but my mind was constantly racing ahead, trying to envision the future.” To the Daily News and Jimmy Powers’s Powerhouse, however, the future was now. And now was sordid.

  Although I never seriously considered Rickey’s suggestion that I go to work for him in Pittsburgh, when he wanted someone urgently his sales pitch would put the gabbiest used car salesmen to shame. His persuasive power and his great baseball gifts brought a wide variety of talented people into the once atrophied Dodger organization. These included his son Branch Jr., nicknamed Twig, a baseball-wise hard-drinking diabetic; Allan Roth, the founding father of modern baseball statistics; E. J. “Buzzie” Bavasi, smart and charming and as devious as a counterspy; and Arthur Mann, a former newspaper reporter who gained renown by playing the role of Branch Sr. in skits staged by the New York baseball writers at their annual dinner in the Hotel Waldorf Astoria. Mann looked a bit like Rickey, sounded a lot like Rickey and was Rickey’s choice to collaborate on Rickey’s memoir. (A heart attack killed Mann at the age of 65, before the memoir was even begun.)

  Mann monitored the News and specifically studied the Powerhouse on a daily basis. He counted a total of 154 columns that blasted Rickey with varying degrees of severity. Powers wrote that Rickey secretly disliked Brooklyn and was trying to quit and take over the Yankees. He wrote repeatedly that “El Cheapo Rickey pays his players coolie salaries.” He demanded that the Dodger stockholders fire Rickey. He then asked readers to vote upon two choices: “Shall we send Rickey over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Shall we maroon him on a Bikini atoll?”

  The News ran these angry pieces even as Rickey was assembling the greatest baseball team in Brooklyn history. Among the white stars-to-be that he signed were Gil Hodges, Carl Erskine, Clem Labine and Duke Snider. The black stars, Robinson, Campanella and Newcombe, followed close behind.

  Within just a few years, Rickey had established ownership or working agreements with no fewer than 27 minor-league teams. That meant contracts for about 500 players. Newport News of the Class D Piedmont League, equivalent to a Single-A league today, numbered 15 athletes 17 years old or younger on its roster. Jake Pitler, one of the few Jewish minor-league managers, ran the club and commented, “Our kids were so young that our team bus was loaded with comic books and candy bars, but practicably no shaving cream.” Two of the youngsters were Clem Labine and Duke Snider. Rickey showed me Pitler’s scouting report on Snider, dated September 2, 1944.

  “Well built and moves good,” Pitler noted. “Good fielding. Good power. Very good arm. Must improve on hitting curveball. Has a lot of ability. Might go all the way.” Snider, of course, went all the way to Cooperstown. But Jimmy Powers did not look into what was really going on in Brooklyn, much less on the vital but faraway farms. In something like four seasons of covering the Dodgers pretty much every day, I never once saw Powers at Ebbets Field. Why not? He never went to Ebbets Field. He was committed to rage rather than reporting, and he even managed to attack Rickey on the issue of integration.

  “We question Branch Rickey’s statement that he is another Abraham Lincoln,” Powers wrote. (I never heard nor can I find a record of any such statement. Rickey did hang a picture of Lincoln above his desk, but that evidenced admiration, not ego. For the same reason a replica of Leo Cherne’s bust of Lincoln, presented to me by the Union League Club, sits prominently on a bookshelf in my own office.) Jimmy Powers continued, “We resent pontificating sports promoters who talk a lot. What we wish to see is how much money these ‘liberals’ are personally willing to sacrifice to back up their fancy speeches. You will usually find they are framing their pretty press releases primarily to make money out of the colored people and the colored athletes.”

  Sometimes, when Powers was occupied with other matters, he ordered Dick Young to ghostwrite the Powerhouse, directing the thrust of what Young was to type. On one occasion Young approached my Herald Tribune colleague Harold Rosenthal and said, “I got a date. I need you to write tomorrow’s Powerhouse for me.” Rosenthal agreed, then told me merrily, “I’m ghosting a column for Dick Young ghosting a column for Jimmy Powers.”

  “A ghostly trio,” I said, but Harold didn’t hear me. He had already started typing.

  When Powers found time to write his own column, he continued his barrage. The Cardinals’ success, pennants in 1942, ’43, ’44 and ’46, was largely the work of good field managers, Billy Southworth and Eddie Dyer, not the efforts of “Old Man Rickey” upstairs. Ebbets Field needed refurbishing. That would never happen with “El Cheapo” Rickey running things, Powers announced. He wouldn’t even pay to modernize the restrooms. Brooklyn fans, Powers wrote, were proving to be the best and most loyal anywhere in baseball. Despite their small home ballpark, the Dodgers led the major leagues in attendance five times in an eight-year stretch during the 1940s. What was happening to all those gate receipts? Powers asked. The fans of Brooklyn had a right to know. (Among other persons, places and things, the money went to fund the best farm system in baseball, pay a superb scouting staff and outstanding coaches and to build Dodgertown, the matchless spring-training facility where black and white players would live comfortably side by side, even though they were situated within the borders of Vero Beach, a small, all-white, racist Southern town.)

  A curious tempest broke in February 1948, when Ralph Branca, coming off the best season of his career, was negotiating a new contract with Rickey. Branca grew up in suburban Mount Vernon, New York, and one February day the local paper there, the Daily Argus, broke a story that Branca had signed a new Dodger contract calling for about $13,000 a year. Dick Young immediately grew furious. He and the mighty Daily News had been scooped by the Daily Argus. Rickey became just as angry. His policy dictated that signings were to be announced by the ball club office, not by individual players.

  Young telephoned Rickey about the Argus story. “Not accurate,” Rickey said.

  “But I happen to know,” Young said, “that you’ve held private meetings with the kid.”

  “Indeed,” Rickey said, “covering a range of issues, all significant.”

  By the time Young reached Branca, the young pitcher was insisting he had only talked contract with Rickey, not signed. Young refused to believe him and then wrote in the News:

  The righteous Mr. Rickey is contributing to the delinquency of a nice young man like Branca by ordering him to lie.

  Branca followed instructions by stating that he had not signed, but that he expected to do so when he met Mr. Rickey again.

  Young was asserting that two prominent Dodger people, Rickey and Branca, were outright liars. His anger continued to burn and the next day Young wrote:

  This morning Ralph Branca will enter the gas chamber for a second exposure to Branch Rickey’s oratorical fumes. This afternoon the Dodger front office will be able to announce that its star right-hander has signed his ’48 contract for something less than $14,000—one of the most miserly documents ever offered a 20-game winner.

  Rickey called a press conference that was convened in his office and read aloud much of Young’s story and concluding comments: “Branca, after wiping the blood off his ears, was more than willing to escape with his life.”

  Rickey shook his head and said to the assembled press, “That’s supposed to be clever writing, I guess.”

  Rickey pressed a button on his intercom. A side door opened and in walked a hulking, hawk-nosed nervous youngster. Ralph Branca.

  “Sit down, Branca,” Rickey said. “Have we been holding conversations?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “About what?”

  “You feel I should get married,” Branca said.
“You said if I don’t get married I’ll be nothing more than a matrimonial coward.”

  “Correct, Branca,” Rickey said. “Have you signed your 1948 contract?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Rickey.”

  Rickey pointed a stubby index finger directly at Dick Young. “I demand an apology from you right now and I want one with a retraction in your newspaper tomorrow.” Everyone in the room turned to stare at Young. “I apologize,” the newspaperman said.

  Rickey decisively won the skirmish, but knowingly or not he was starting a war. He had made a lifetime enemy of Young.

  Dick Young’s cauldron continued bubbling with spleen, although his primary target would change from the Dodger general manager to the Dodger field manager. After Chandler suspended Durocher in 1947, Rickey wanted to replace Leo the Lip with somber, hard-drinking “Marse” Joe McCarthy, who had won four consecutive pennants while running the Yankees. But McCarthy, highly allergic to sportswriters, considered the Brooklyn situation and decided to stay retired in Buffalo, New York. Then Clyde Sukeforth declined the job. Rickey reached back into his past and brought in Burt Shotton, a grumpy 62-year-old baseball veteran whom Rickey had known in St. Louis 40 years earlier. Never afraid of the dramatic, Rickey wired Shotton at his Florida home: “Be in Brooklyn in the morning. Call nobody. See no one.”

  Shotton told Rickey that at his age he no longer wanted to climb into uniform. He would manage in street clothes. Under the rules that meant he could not leave the dugout. He could not go face-to-face with umpires, nor, in an on-field blowup, could he rush to Robinson’s aid. Rickey accepted the terms. He announced at a press conference that Shotton “has always been my idea of a number one pilot. I believe he’ll prove to be the greatest manager hereabouts since John McGraw.” This was pure Rickey hyperbole.

  Obviously a manager determines the lineup, rotates the pitchers and calls the plays. Less recognized, but just about equally important is a manager’s handling and, if necessary, pacifying the media. Three of the most successful managers of my experience, Whitey Herzog, Joe Torre and Casey Stengel, were masters of media relations. They knew baseball, of course, but they also formed close, even affectionate relationships with important journalists. Stengel, cold to writers he did not know, became a wonderful dugout host for Red Smith of the Trib and Arthur Daley, Smith’s genial but prosaic bookend at the Times.

  Today baseball rules control the media’s access to clubhouses. Ball clubs set time restraints so that, at least in theory, players can focus their concentration before each game and establish their composure afterwards. The trainers’ quarters are off-limits, on the grounds of privacy. The media is completely barred from players’ private lounges within dressing rooms. Some of the reasoning here is questionable. Ball club officials are manipulative about injuries. Open trainers’ rooms would assist honest reporting. Private lounges? An invention of haughty ballplayers and their haughty union, who would prefer absolutely no dealing with the press. But during the 1940s, particularly in Brooklyn, the clubhouses were open and constantly alive with friends, cousins, visitors, journalists and chirping children. Privacy was not then seen as an issue. Ballplayers were public figures. Leave privacy to dental hygienists and librarians.

  Young walked about the Dodger clubhouse with a swagger and when he wanted to interview a player he began by ordering, “Sit down.” Young was short, perhaps five foot six. When asking questions, he preferred to tower over his subject.

  His manner annoyed Shotton. Far from courting Young, Shotton tried to ignore him. Young rode the team hard, questioning the courage of certain players and in time informing his readers that Shotton was a fraud. “Behind the phony, grandfatherly manner,” Young wrote, “there lurks a mean old man.” With heavy sarcasm Young began referring to Shotton in the Daily News as KOBS, an acronym for Kindly Old Burt Shotton. If the Dodgers lost, usually it was because of mismanaging by KOBS. If they won, usually it was in spite of KOBS.

  Shotton did not get along with Harold Rosenthal of the Trib either, and took to addressing him as “Rosenberg.” Rosenthal then told all who would listen, “The son of a bitch is not only mean. He’s an anti-Semite.”

  Where was Rickey amid these disruptive events detonating about his ball club? I’m afraid the answer is that for the time being at least, Mr. Rickey was out to lunch.

  Finally one late summer day—the specific precipitant is lost to history—a few minutes before game time Burt Shotton exploded on the bench. He stood up in his street clothes and shouted, “I hate you, Young. Everybody on this team hates you, Young. You are barred from our clubhouse.”

  “Hey, Dick,” Harold Rosenthal shouted. “I’ll give you my clubhouse notes every day.”

  Shotton yelled: “You stay out of this, Rosenberg.”

  The entire team sat in silent shock. Then Pee Wee Reese got up and threw an arm around Young’s shoulders. “I don’t hate you, Dick,” Reese said.

  Here, in retrospect, was a Rickey mistake. Instead of putting up with Shotton and the veteran’s mangling of Dodgers press relations, it seems to me that Rickey should have dumped KOBS and hired Pee Wee Reese to manage. Reese was smart, humorous, poised, knew the game and had the affection and respect of the entire team and all the sportswriters who were covering the team, including the feral Dick Young.

  Was Reese too young to manage? After Bill Veeck appointed the Cleveland shortstop Lou Boudreau as player–manager, the Indians swept to a pennant and won the 1948 World Series from the Boston Braves. Lou Boudreau was all of one year older than Pee Wee Reese.

  Not that Rickey was entirely passive. He organized a task force in the Dodger offices to gather negative information about his tormentors on the Daily News. In 1949, Arthur Mann reported, someone, never identified, sent Rickey a copy of a letter Jimmy Powers had written during World War II to an official of the corporation that owned the News. The specific suggestion was an allegation that Powers was sympathetic to Adolf Hitler.

  “I talked to the captain [publisher Joseph Medill Patterson] last night,” Powers began, “and he told me not to worry over latrine gossip picked up by the FBI, that if Winchell and the rest of the Jews had their way America would be a vast concentration camp from Maine to California. There wouldn’t be enough barbed wire to hold back all the decent Christians maligned by the Jews and those who run with them. In short I was in pretty good company with Col. McCormick [the isolationist publisher of the Chicago Tribune], Joe Kennedy [the isolationist father of the future president] and several other decent family men. [Joe Kennedy’s philandering with the actress Gloria Swanson was widely known.] How in hell can I be termed ‘pro-Nazi’ simply because I don’t like certain crackpot politicians and Jews.”

  This appalling letter, thought Rickey, the old Michigan Law School graduate, was just what he needed to bring a suit against Powers and the News for libel and defamation of character. When Powers’s simmering anti-Semitism came to light, Rickey reasoned, it would surely cost him his job. The El Cheapo slurs would then become history. But the Dodgers’ lawyer advised against litigating. He said, “Laugh it off. A suit will mean that every newspaper turns against you. They hang together like pack rats.” The club lawyer, Walter Francis O’Malley, hardly a disinterested party, was staying up late nights and getting up early mornings, plotting to throw Rickey out of Brooklyn. Then the Big Oom would seize the Dodgers for himself.

  Was Byzantium itself ever so byzantine?

  I doubt it.

  NINE

  BRANCH AND MR. ROBINSON

  ONE COULD NOT WORK OR PLAY FOR LONG with Jackie Robinson without hearing him mention the name of Branch Rickey. Robinson’s admiration for his loquacious, heavy-browed benefactor was unqualified and unalloyed to such an extent that it made some observers uncomfortable. Although their association lasted a quarter century, Robinson never addressed or referred to Rickey as “Branch.” It was always and pointedly Mister Rickey. Robinson intended this as a dignified expression of respect, but repeated often enough, the word �
�mister” seemed to suggest subservience, notably to more radical blacks such as Malcolm X. “I’d expect,” Malcolm told me during a telephone interview shortly before he was assassinated in 1965, “that sooner or later Jackie will start calling Rickey ‘Massa.’”

  Robinson never used “mister” in referring to anyone else in the generally informal world of baseball. Not to his teammates, not to opponents, not to umpires, nor even to other prominent officials who influenced his career. Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager after Rickey, was simply Buzzie. Ford Frick, who as National League president heroically put down a planned redneck strike against Robinson, was simply Frick.

  When Robinson organized the monthly magazine Our Sports, which was directed primarily at black fans, he hired me to write articles, suggest story ideas and help him compose a monthly column. It would not take much time, I knew, before Mister Rickey would be the subject of a column. But it surprised me when Robinson in a very inventive way made sure his Rickey piece drew wide attention from the mainstream media.

  Robinson telephoned me in January 1953 and asked if I could join him for lunch and a meeting in the Flatiron Building, a venerable, steel-framed skyscraper in lower Manhattan. “It will be worth your while,” he said. “There’s something in it for you.” We had become close during the season of 1952, when Robinson put in a characteristically solid year, batting .309, hitting 19 home runs and making the all-star team at second base. As I’ve indicated, I came to my Dodger assignment predisposed to supporting Robinson because I was supportive of baseball integration.