Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  The Robinsons’ daughter, Sharon, attended the ceremony on a raw, wet day. Rachel, then 88, sent a message. “That place in Montreal was so warm and loving it was really our honeymoon cottage.”

  The Royals would run off with the ’46 pennant, finishing 181⁄2 games ahead of the field. Stan Breard didn’t make it at shortstop. Al Campanis replaced him and batted .294. Years afterward Campanis told me more than once that he had taught Robinson the footwork a second baseman needs to master the pivot and complete a double play. “Jack had the greatest natural aptitude of any player I’ve ever seen,” Campanis, an NYU graduate, said. “In one-half hour he learned to make the pivot correctly. He had some deficiencies including arm strength and going to his left, but he overcame both because he was such a great athlete and he applied himself to the game with such intensity.” Years after that, as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Campanis lost his job for making rock-headed racial comments on network television. But he showed no bigotry whatsoever at Montreal. (Robinson himself did not mention help from Campanis. Instead, he said one Lou Rochelli, a reserve infielder from Illinois, was the man who took the time and effort to teach him double-play footwork. Louis Joseph Rochelli died in 1992 and few in baseball remember him today. Robinson never forgot him.)

  Robinson’s season, Montreal, 1946, can well be said to have been the greatest performance turned in by any baseball player ever up to that time, including:

  1. Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants pitching three shutouts over six days during the 1905 World Series. In 27 innings, he walked one batter.

  2. Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers hitting .420 and stealing 83 bases in 1911. He led the American League in everything but smiles.

  3. Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees hitting 60 home runs in 1927 and burying the dead ball behind and beneath his considerable bulk.

  Although the historic numbers I cite are meaningful, they don’t present Mathewson’s magisterial presence, Cobb’s jungle ferocity or Ruth’s swaggering intimidation. The numbers game is a nasty gambling racket. Baseball is a game of people.

  Statistics are significant, but not nearly as important or revelatory as suggested by many earnest Figure Filberts. The Oakland Athletics, the model statistical team in Moneyball, finished 22 games out of first place in 2011. Attendance at the Oakland Coliseum was the poorest in the 14-team American League. That same year the Boston Red Sox, another Moneyball bunch, lost their field manager, their general manager and, if the Boston Globe is to be believed, their self-respect.

  Robinson’s numbers in Montreal were strong. He led the International League in batting at .349 and in runs scored, 113 in 124 games. He stole 40 bases; his teammate Marv “Rabbit” Rackley, from a South Carolina mill town, stole 65. But Robinson was caught stealing 15 times, roughly 1 out of every 4 tries, which suggests he was still learning the art of baserunning. Although these numbers are interesting, they cannot begin to suggest the revolutionary nature of Robinson’s presence.

  John “Spider” Jorgensen, the Montreal third baseman in 1946, recalled that he was civil to Robinson, but not close. “I didn’t go over to his house for dinner or anything like that. If I had, there were guys on the team who would have called me ‘nigger lover.’” Jorgensen said he was focused on his own career—he and Robinson would make their Dodger debuts on the same April day in 1947—and didn’t recognize the historic nature of Robinson’s role until it was pointed out to him by Rackley. “People are always going to remember this team,” Rackley said, “because we’re playing the first Negro in the history of baseball.” Rackley said he had no trouble adjusting to Robinson as a teammate. “A lot of that, probably, was because he was such a terrific ballplayer. And he was soft-spoken off the field. A real gentleman.”

  Herman Franks, a Montreal catcher, had played for the Dodgers and would go on to manage the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago Cubs. Franks didn’t hit in Brooklyn—his lifetime batting average was .199—and the fans, echoing the cries of vendors, took to shouting at him, “Get hot, Franks.” He eventually became an investment advisor and for several years managed Willie Mays’s money.

  “That Montreal team,” Franks told me, “was really well-rounded. We didn’t have a 20-game winner, but we had a lot of good hitters and we played good defense and we had plenty of speed. Jackie was a great teammate, but he really had a tough time breaking in. I won’t even repeat the garbage that got shouted at him. When we went down to Baltimore early in the season, some of the Baltimore squad wanted to know if we were really going to come on the field with a black player. They said if we did, they didn’t want to play the game. We said, ‘Well, you don’t have to play the game. We’re going out there and we’ll take a win by forfeit.’”

  Homer Elliott “Dixie” Howell, another Montreal catcher, made the Dodgers briefly in 1953 when I was covering the team. He was a personable fellow out of Louisville, Kentucky, and one night after the Dodgers had been caught in a harrowing beanball battle, we had dinner together on a Pullman diner. The fare, it was always the fare on ballplayer dining cars: shrimp cocktail, steak, apple pie à la mode. We started talking about the knockdown pitches and I asked Howell, who had been playing pro ball for 14 years, if this was the worst he had seen. He looked surprised. “No way,” he said. “I was with Jackie on Montreal. The way he was thrown at that year was unbelievable. Unbelievable and disgraceful.”

  Perhaps the single most appalling incident occurred when Montreal was playing a game in Syracuse against the Chiefs. A Syracuse player—his name is lost—threw a black cat out of the dugout and onto the field. Then he shouted, “Hey, Robinson. Here’s your cousin.” The game stopped while umpires retrieved the frightened animal.

  Robinson dug in and doubled to left. The next batter singled. As Robinson rounded third and headed home he shouted at the Syracuse dugout, “I guess my cousin’s pretty happy now.”

  The Royals far outpaced the rest of the International League. By August their lead was substantial; eventually they would clinch the pennant two weeks before the end of the regular season. A headline summed up “Robinson Leads Royals to Title,” but the stress, mostly fueled by incessant racism, pushed Robinson to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

  Outwardly he seemed to be taking everything in stride, including Rickey’s prime directive that he was not to fight back. But in the modest apartment on de Gaspé Avenue, Rachel, who as we have noted trained as a nurse, saw increasing signs and symptoms of stress. Robinson never smoked and did not drink until the last years of his life, when a physician suggested he take a few cocktails daily to improve his circulation. But he was always a big eater, so much so that in time he developed weight problems. Now in Montreal his robust appetite disappeared. He began suffering periods of nausea. He found it hard to fall asleep and harder still to stay asleep. Clay Hopper thought Jackie looked tense and suggested that he see a doctor. Rachel made the same suggestion. Insisting that he felt fine, Robinson went for a checkup.

  The examining physician, a sports fan, had some idea of the pressures his celebrity patient was enduing. At length he reported, “You’re a fine physical specimen, Mr. Robinson, but the tension is taking a toll. I want you to get completely away from baseball for at least 10 days. Take a medical leave from the Royals. Don’t read the sports pages. Don’t listen to the radio. Do you have a favorite pastime?”

  “I like driving golf balls.”

  “Then for 10 days I want you to drive golf balls and picnic with your wife. That’s my prescription.”

  Robinson’s medical leave lasted one day. “I was leading the league in hitting with a good chance to win the batting championship. That would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it, the first black ballplayer becomes a batting champion? But if I took 10 days off, you know what the ‘antis’ would say. ‘He’s goofing off to protect his average. He’s only a batting champion by default.’”

  Robinson gave me a look that was both hard and vulnerable. “I couldn’t have that. I went back to work with
my glove and bat.”

  Montreal swept through the playoffs, defeating Newark, a Yankee farm team, four games to two. In this set Robinson batted .318. Then the Royals defeated the raucous Chiefs, a team in the Cincinnati chain, four games to one. Here Robinson batted .400. These victories set the stage for him to play in a widely popular event called the Little (or Junior) World Series, which flourished from 1905 to 1975. The Little World Series, which was not of course the Little League World Series, annually matched the champions of the International League and the American Association. Although dissenting voices sounded from the Pacific Coast, the winner of the Little World Series could claim to be the best of all the teams in the minor leagues.

  Louisville—I learned much of this from Pee Wee Reese, who grew up there—was as rigidly racist as any city in the United States. Reese recalled his father, a detective for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, walking him down a country lane toward a tree with a stout branch extending parallel to the ground about 10 feet high. “When a nigger gets uppity,” the elder Reese said, “that’s the branch we lynch him from.” (Reese’s evolution from his apartheid boyhood to his championing of Robinson became one of the wonders of American sport and indeed the American experience.)

  The Louisville stadium, Parkway Field, was one of the most notable of the old minor-league arenas. It opened on May 1, 1923, complete with a grandstand that was reported to accommodate 18,000 fans. Several major-league stars played in exhibitions there, most notably Babe Ruth. During an exhibition on June 2, 1924, Ruth, according to Bruce Dudley, then sports editor of the Courier-Journal, “socked the gosh-awfullest ball that ever has been croaked in the history of the game in Louisville.” Though that seventh-inning drive went foul, Dudley wrote, “Louisville never can believe that any foul ever has gone higher or farther. For many moments it seemed that the ball would drop on to the top of the grain elevators across the road beyond the right field barrier. Then in the ninth inning everybody stood, seemingly in a salute to a national hero, and Babe Ruth, the hero, merited that mark of homage by crashing the ball over the Louisville Provision Company’s sign in right center field.” (But that day the Louisville Colonels defeated the Yankees of Ruth and Lou Gehrig, 7 to 6. Even the magnificent Yankees could lose to a good minor-league team, at least in an exhibition game.)

  A less inspiring aspect of Parkway Field tradition was segregation. “I remember going to games there when I was in high school,” Reese told me, “and it was pretty much whites only. Blacks had to use a separate entrance way down near the outfield and they were restricted to the worst seats in the place. And of course before Jackie, all the ballplayers were white.”

  With his farm system mastery, Rickey maintained contacts throughout the minor leagues and private sources now informed him that Robinson’s appearance at Parkway Field would stir bitter opposition. “We were going to defy one of the fundamental Kentucky traditions,” he told me. “An obnoxious tradition, but one that many Southerners held sacred. Putting a black second baseman on the field side by side with whites seemed to them nothing short of sacrilege.”

  The Brown Hotel in Louisville became famous as a gathering place for sporting types each spring around Kentucky Derby time. The white Royals would bunk in there during the Little World Series, but Robinson was barred. Montreal officials placed him in the home of a prosperous black lawyer. “The family welcomed me,” Robinson said, “but away from my teammates I felt isolated.”

  Rumblings of another sort emanated from Brooklyn. In a poll taken before the 1946 season, 119 sportswriters were asked to predict the National League pennant winner. A total of 115 journalists picked the Cardinals, a team powered by Stan Musial and Enos Slaughter. None chose the Dodgers. But the Brooklyn team broke fast and kept going and at one time built a seven-game first-place lead. “What’s keeping the Dodgers up?” asked the confused editors of Time magazine in a lengthy feature on Musial. In point of fact, few editors at Time had any feel for the grit and gut of baseball; croquet was more up their alley.

  Certainly one factor was fan support. Despite the limited capacity of Ebbets Field, the 1946 Dodgers drew 1,796,824 fans, or roughly 25,000 a game. No other team in the league even came close, and these numbers supported the claims of Brooklyn people that theirs was the greatest baseball town on earth. (The idea that in the next decade a buccaneering lawyer would hijack the Dodgers and dump them into the Los Angeles Coliseum was beyond imagination and beyond nightmares.)

  Dan Parker, a crackling good columnist for Hearst’s Daily Mirror, now made an interesting point. Montreal had won its pennant. Robinson had led his league in hitting. The so-called noble experiment so far was a huge success. But the Dodgers suddenly were stumbling. The Cardinals caught them and at the end of the regular National League season the teams were tied for first place, each with 96 victories and 58 defeats. Ford Frick, the National League president, ordered a playoff series, best two out of three. “What better way to crown Robinson’s breakthrough season than to bring him up to the Dodgers so he could join and possibly lead the team through an historic playoff?”

  “What about the fans in Montreal?” Rickey said.

  “My paper,” Parker said, “publishes in New York.”

  In later years Rickey went to some lengths to explain his thinking to me. He did not want to promote Robinson until the other Brooklyn players were ready to accept him. That, he said, could only happen after they had seen how good he was. “Which they will in spring training the following season.” That was as misguided a call as any Rickey ever made.

  By the time the Dodger playoff began in St. Louis on October 1, the Royals and Robinson were having their troubles in Louisville. But the national focus was directed at the major-league scramble. There had only been one pennant playoff in big-league history and that was the single game between the Giants and the Chicago Cubs in 1908. Christy Mathewson, who won 37 games for the Giants that year, said that his arm felt tired. He had already pitched more than 380 innings. But John McGraw chose to start him and Matty did not walk away from challenges. “I had to start,” he said, “to meet my own idea of courage.”

  Frank Chance, who managed Chicago, played a hunch and started Jack “the Giant Killer” Pfiester. But Chance quickly had to relieve Pfiester with his own ace, Mordecai Peter Centennial “Three Finger” Brown. That season Brown had won 29. Had you combed the entire cosmos back then, you could not have found two finer pitchers than Matty and “Miner” Brown. In a classic ballgame Brown bested Mathewson, 4 to 2, with Chance contributing a key double. Now, almost 40 years later, a pennant playoff had come again to baseball.

  Mathewson was long dead. Poison gas damaged his lungs when he was serving in the Chemical Corps during World War I. He never fully recovered and perished in an Adirondack sanitarium at the age of 45. McGraw had to organize a charity exhibition game to pay Mathewson’s final medical bills.

  Brown was alive, but quite forgotten. Baseball nostalgia had not yet begun to flood America. Plagued by diabetes, Brown was running a filling station in Terre Haute, Indiana, and telling his baseball stories to anyone who would listen. No one thought to invite a venerable hero to this later playoff. Two years afterward this great pitcher died. His induction into the Hall of Fame, long overdue, was posthumous.

  Rickey told me that his ideal ball club would consist of young position players and veteran pitchers. “The position players will have speed. The veteran pitchers will have poise.” Unaccountably Rickey and Dodger manager Leo Durocher chose Ralph Branca to start the playoff in St. Louis. Branca was only 20 years old and on the record he would become the most unfortunate pitcher in the history of playoff baseball. He had a fine fastball, a big sweeping curve and a tendency to wilt under pressure. The Cardinals started a tall, elegant left-hander, Howie Pollet, five years older than Branca, who was coming off a 20-game-winning season. Branca did not finish the third inning and in the end the Dodgers had to use five pitchers. Pollet never lost command. He won, 4 to 2.

&
nbsp; After a travel day, the teams met again before a noisy sellout crowd at Ebbets Field. The Cards went with right-hander Murry Dickson, who threw curves, changeups, sliders and knucklers. The Dodgers started a journeyman left-hander, Joe Hatten. The Dodgers reached Dickson for a run in the first inning, but the Cards came back with 2 in the second and 3 more in the fifth. They won handily, 8 to 4 (and would go on to defeat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series).

  The Dodgers’ performance in the playoff was not terrible. It was simply f lat. Suppose Rickey had promoted Jackie Robinson and brought into the major-league playoff series this arrow of dark fire. Would Jack have ignited the dormant Dodgers? I like to think so. Rickey did not like to think so. In truth, no one can say.

  What might have been is an abstraction

  Remaining a perpetual possibility

  Only in a world of speculation.

  That is not Branch Rickey I am quoting, but someone else prominent in the annals of St. Louis history.

  T. S. Eliot, who was born there in 1888.

  By all accounts the crowd that assembled in Parkway Field in Louisville on September 28, 1946, was ugly. Some were surprised there was any crowd at all.

  When it became increasingly likely that the Royals, including Robinson, were coming south to play the Colonels in the Little World Series, a vocal group plainly demanded that the series be canceled. Twenty years before, Jack Dempsey had been forced to terminate a series of exhibition bouts in the South because his sparring partner, Big Bill Tate, was a black man. One Southern newspaperman wrote: “Should Dempsey slip, the crowd would see a nigra standing over a white man. That plainly is intolerable.”