Baseball

by George Vecsey

  Mr. Rickey was not exactly Abe Lincoln, who emerged from a log cabin to become president, but Rickey's life does resonate from another place and time. He was a farm boy from southern Ohio who attended Ohio Wesleyan University and then joined the minor leagues, promising his mother that he would never work on Sunday, to honor their Christian beliefs. Rickey made it to the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns and New York Highlanders from 1905 through 1907, later playing two games back with the Browns in 1914.

  His strength would be teaching and scouting, finding better ways to play the game. While still in the minor leagues, he had coached at his old school, Ohio Wesleyan, using football techniques to train his baseball players.

  While earning a law degree and coaching at the University of Michigan in 1911, Rickey made the first great discovery of his career, George Sisler, a stylish first baseman who would play 15 seasons and bat .340. In his early days, Sisler twice outpitched the great Walter (Big Train) Johnson before concentrating on first base. After Sisler retired in 1930, Rickey called him “the greatest player that ever lived,” which may have been an exaggeration—Babe Ruth was both a better hitter and pitcher—but understandably loyal all the same.

  By 1913 Rickey was back managing the Browns, initiating new drills in spring training for players who had previously gone from winter sloth to rusty baseball mechanics on the first day of camp. Rickey's camps included handball to improve hand-eye coordination, batting cages, sliding pits, a running track, and daily lectures to reinforce techniques being taught on the field, much as he would do with three other major league teams later in his life.

  In 1919 Rickey switched to the Cardinals, then the secondary team in St. Louis. Ahead of his time, as always, Rickey took a control-freak interest in all the details, even the Cardinals' uniforms in 1921, splashing a logo of two redbirds across the chest of the uniforms, an idea he had gotten from a design of a church decoration in St. Louis. He also began the first Knothole Gang, allowing children into games for free, to build a new generation of fans, which the Cardinals sorely needed.

  With no money for spring training, the Cards trained at home in chilly Midwestern March. Rickey once had to resort to selling a rug from his own home to meet the bills. “That kind of thing drove me mad,” Rickey once said about the Cardinals' poverty. “I pondered long on it, and finally concluded that, if we were too poor to buy, we would have to raise our own.”

  He decided to build a reserve system of minor league players, an idea that went back to Albert Spalding. The minors had essentially remained independent, with clubs developing their own talent and selling it upward to the majors, at prices too high for the Cardinals. In 1919 Rickey began his empire by buying 18 percent of the Houston team in the Texas League, followed by a share of Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the Western Association. He loaded up the teams with the help of talent scouts, including Charlie Barrett, known as “the king of the weeds.”

  A national agreement of 1921 forbade major league clubs from stockpiling players, but some teams got around it by calling it “lending.” In 1922, the United States Supreme Court heard a complaint by the Baltimore team from the upstart Federal League, alleging that the major leagues illegally wielded a reserve clause on players, in restraint of free trade and in violation of the Sherman Act of 1890.

  Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered an opinion for the unanimous majority that baseball did not constitute interstate commerce. “The business is giving exhibitions of baseball, which are purely state affairs,” wrote Justice Holmes, who added, “Owners produce baseball games as a source of profit, [they] cannot change the character of the games. They are still sport, not trade.''

  That opinion would strengthen club owners for more than half a century, handing them legal control of their players, whose only options were to accept the contract offered them or not play at all. By defining baseball as a sport, the Supreme Court had essentially turned it into a national asset. It was bad enough that the general public accepted this pro-business decision, but many players came to believe it, too. They smarted under arbitrary salary limits, but at the same time resisted calls to collective action, as if unionism were a treasonous act against their homeland. A good portion of the sporting press went along with it, too.

  Empowered by the Supreme Court's decision, Rickey continued to buy up portions of minor league teams, along with the contracts of hundreds of players. Unsuccessful at managing, Rickey was replaced in 1925 by Rogers Hornsby, the great second baseman. With Rickey concentrating on the front office, the Cardinals won their first pennant in 1926 and beat the Yankees in the World Series, with Grover Cleveland Alexander trekking out of the bullpen to save the seventh game, while he was allegedly hungover. By 1928, the Cardinals had five farm teams, and fifty of their former farmhands were in the major leagues.

  Rickey's stockpile soon caught the attention of Judge Landis, who liberated approximately 100 minor-leaguers from their contracts, unleashing the phrase “Rickey's chain gang.” Rickey was unabashed. “He would go to places like South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, and pay a certain figure to every club for the rights to the best player on the roster,” said his grandson, Branch B. Rickey, who in 2005 was the president of the Pacific Coast League.

  The Cardinals also won pennants in 1928, 1930, 1931, and 1934, as Rickey constantly reloaded his dynasty with players like the loquacious Jay Hanna (Dizzy) Dean, out of Lucas, Arkansas, who won 58 games in 1934–35. With the Depression gripping the land in the 1930s, Rickey's scouts recruited in areas suffering from poverty and desperation—coming up with Albert (Red) Schoendienst from Germantown, Illinois, who had suffered an eye injury while training in the Civilian Conservation Corps; Stanley Frank Musial, from smogbound Donora, Pennsylvania; Enos Slaughter from Roxboro, North Carolina.

  Long after his fabled dash home to win the 1946 World Series, Slaughter reminisced how he had been signed by Wanzer Rickey, the brother of Branch and apparently very much from the same frugal mold. Slaughter said Wanzer had given him a modest signing bonus of a shotgun and two hunting dogs, but the two dogs had run away almost immediately. The funny thing was, Slaughter added, that Dizzy Dean had an identical signing experience with the Cardinals many years earlier. “Me and Diz always wondered if they were the same two dogs,” Slaughter said.

  At first, Rickey's empire-building methods were scorned by John J. McGraw, who, for the record, had also scoffed at Babe Ruth's home runs. In turn, the Yankees were slow to build a farm system but on November 12, 1931, Jacob Ruppert purchased the Newark, New Jersey, team just across the Hudson River, and stocked it up with Yankee farmhands. The Yankees managed to have it both ways, rolling through the 1930s by signing young stars like Joe DiMaggio and Tony Lazzeri from strong independent teams in the Pacific Coast League and elsewhere.

  Rickey gave the impression of having taken a vow of poverty, but the poverty seemed to apply mostly to his players. By the end of his time with the Cardinals, his salary was said to be $75,000, plus a percentage of the price every time the Cardinals sold a player. Those terms do not sound like much this age when general managers make multimillion-dollar rock-star salaries, but Rickey's income during the Depression was considerable, particularly for an executive who could quote the Sermon on the Mount to players asking for a raise.

  According to legend, Rickey balanced the sacred and the secular, observing the Sabbath while keeping both eyes on the turnstiles. On Sundays he rented a room in the YMCA across from Sports-man's Park, training binoculars on the ticket lines. He preached ethical behavior but his Cardinals were called the Gashouse Gang because of their rough ways. They committed pranks in hotels, played Dixieland on banjos and harmonicas during long train rides, fought with the opposition or amongst themselves—and won pennants.

  Shortly after the Cardinals won the pennant in 1942, the Cardinals' owner, Sam Breadon, said he could no longer afford Rickey. Moving on to Brooklyn, Rickey continued to stockpile and train young talent, particularly in spring training. In 1948,
the Dodgers bought a former naval air base in Vero Beach, Florida, eventually calling it Dodgertown. Amidst the barracks and diamonds, Rickey was in his glory, personally delivering lectures on subjects like “The Cure Is Sweat” and “Leisure Time Is the Anathema of Youth.” He imposed rules on his players, many of them veterans of combat in World War Two—no cards, no liquor, no cigarettes, frequent weight checks, backed up by refusals of second helpings at the base cafeteria.

  He also introduced the first pitching machines plus a contraption of strings, the size of a strike zone, to teach pitchers control without the embarrassment of an umpire, batter, and watchful fans. Many a wild young pitcher, including Sandy Koufax, was taken out behind the barracks to pitch to the strings.

  For a religious man, Rickey was something of a conniver, known to leave fake contracts conveniently in view on his desk, intimidating his players by making them think the pay scale was even lower than they had imagined. More than half a century later, Rickey's frugality still rankled Ralph Branca, who had been the Dodgers' best pitcher in 1947. “I won 21 games,” Branca recalled in 2005, “and I led the league in starts with 36, but he told me I walked too many batters. Yeah, I walked 98—because I pitched 280 innings. I sent the contract back. He was mad at me.”

  Rickey's time in Brooklyn came to an end in 1950, when he was pushed out by the new owner, Walter O'Malley. Rickey's teaching methods did not work with the destitute Pirates and he left after 1955. Half a century later, Branch B. Rickey reminisced about the old-fashioned life at the Rickey farm outside Pittsburgh. “We were not country-club,” the grandson said proudly, recalling the pungent odor of the livestock. The center of family life was the Sabbath midday dinner. “I can see my grandfather at the head of the table, anywhere from six to fourteen people,” the grandson said. “He liked to have out-of-towners, make them comfortable. It caused us to have dialogues mixed with social dialogues.”

  In 1960, Rickey tried to build a rival league, the Continental League, which never got off the ground but did force the first expansion of the majors. He then had a brief role as advisor to the Cardinals' ownership in 1964, apparently trying to get his old accomplice, Leo Durocher, hired to replace the fatherly manager, Johnny Keane.

  As a young reporter in 1964, I got a glimpse of Rickey on the night the Cardinals surged into first place during a fantastic pennant race. We were in Keane's tiny office when a hidden door suddenly opened and beetle-browed, three-piece-suited Branch Rickey materialized, like Banquo's Ghost.

  “Johnny Keane, you're a gosh-dang good manager!” Rickey thundered at the man he had been undermining for months. Then Rickey was gone. Keane won the World Series—and immediately quit the Cardinals to join the Yankees.

  A year later, Rickey collapsed at a banquet in his honor, and he died soon afterward, just short of eighty-four. In essence, baseball's great teacher went out talking.

  IX

  THE NEGRO LEAGUES

  While seeking talent for the Cardinals in the destitute corners of the country, Branch Rickey was not ready to tap one great source of talent: black America. Baseball had remained white since the late nineteenth century, when Albert Spalding and Cap Anson contrived to keep blacks out; it preached about being the national pastime and received special dispensation from Congress and the courts, yet it remained segregated nearly halfway into the next century.

  Black players got the message, and formed teams of their own. In 1885, in Babylon, Long Island, New York, a headwaiter at the Argyle Hotel named Frank Thompson organized a team of waiters, called the Cuban Giants. In order to get white fans to ignore their dark skins, the players pretended to speak Spanish, correctly assuming that hardly anybody in the United States could tell they were actually speaking gibberish. The novelty helped the waiters become full-time touring players, with white owners backing them up. Sometimes the players livened up their games with comedy routines—jokes, songs, snappy games of catch with exaggerated motions, maybe a pitcher telling his fielders to sit down while he handled the batter by himself. With their flair for show business, the Cuban Giants were the forerunners of other black teams that felt the need to entertain, like the Harlem Globetrotters of basketball. Just like black actors or singers or even public figures of the day, they had to seem simple, innocent, and harmless.

  Blacks also played the game straight. In 1887, the National Colored Base Ball League, the first attempt at a professional Negro League, was formed. Rebuffed by white America, blacks formed touring teams that played in ramshackle stadiums in black neighborhoods, or sometimes in rented big-league stadiums, producing players now recognized as the equal of the greatest white players, including Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and Satchel Paige.

  Sometimes players slipped through to the major leagues, often Cuban players ostensibly of Spanish heritage. The darker the skin, the louder the insults. A few players of mixed race undoubtedly managed to pass as white or Native American. In my home I have a coffee-table book containing photographs of various major league players from the past ten decades. In the section from the 1920s, a rather inconspicuous player from a border state has noticeably mixed features. My guess is that this player had passed the color scrutiny and was able to earn a major league salary for a few years—and more power to him.

  Generally, it was not easy for a player to get past the vigilant race detectors. John J. McGraw, in his last year with Baltimore in 1901, tried to hire Charlie Grant, a bellhop at the Orioles' spring training base in Arkansas, to play the infield, as long as Grant would maintain the fiction that he was of Cherokee ancestry. After Charles Comiskey threatened to sign a “Chinaman” for his White Sox, the furor ended McGraw's plans. Charlie Grant remained a bellhop until the day he died.

  Rumors persisted that Babe Ruth was part black, based partially on his athletic skills and partially on his broad, flat nose. There was absolutely no basis to this urban legend. In one famous family photograph taken in fin de siècle Baltimore, young George Herman Ruth looks just like dozens of his relatives gathered on a classic white stoop. Nevertheless, many blacks bragged on Ruth, who, while typically congenial to blacks, observed the normal racist language of the day. The great Bambino would accept “monkey” and “ape” as normal heckling from the opposing bench jockeys but would threaten to fight opponents who used racial slurs on him. “Don't get personal,” the Babe warned.

  Some American blacks migrated to Cuba early in the century, relishing the chance to play against touring major league teams like the Tigers, Giants, and Athletics. The aptly named Ban Johnson was so upset when the A's divided eight games, many against the star Cuban pitcher Jose Mendez, that he prohibited his teams from visiting the island. “We want no makeshift club calling themselves the Athletics to go to Cuba to be beaten by colored teams,” Johnson said. Ty Cobb and McGraw uttered the same sour grapes after humbling trips to Cuba.

  In 1911, Andrew (Rube) Foster, a tall pitcher out of Texas, formed his own team, the Chicago American Giants, or Foster's Giants, as people called them. Foster was an astute businessman with ties to the white community, once helping to rebuild the grandstand at the White Sox' South Side ballpark, where his players were welcome only as tenants, not equals.

  Four years later, Foster challenged the upstart Federal League to admit his team but was turned down. He waited out the war and the gambling scandal of 1919, and then in 1920 Foster lobbied for admission of black players to the major leagues. He was led to understand this was not a priority of Judge Landis.

  Realizing that blacks would have to play in a parallel universe, Foster helped organize the Negro National League in 1920, with eight teams, mostly in the Midwest. He felt strongly that the ownership should be black, but he did accept J. L. Wilkinson, the white owner of the powerful Kansas City Monarchs, who helped keep Negro baseball alive. Shortly after that came the Negro Southern League and the Eastern Colored League. In 1924, the first Negro World Series was played, with the Monarchs beating the Hilldale Daisies from Darby, Pennsylvania, five games to four
.

  In the fall, the Negro teams barnstormed with white players, doing so well that in 1921 Judge Landis ordered all white stars to not wear their major league uniforms while playing black teams. In 1926, Foster suffered a nervous breakdown and his league began a quick downturn. He died in 1930 and the league disbanded in 1931, while the Eastern League had disbanded in 1927.

  Still, Negro baseball thrived, partially because of the energy from one city—Pittsburgh. The first powerhouse was the Homestead Grays, representing a steel town on the Monongahela River, just south of Pittsburgh, once the base of a giant United States Steel plant.

  The Grays were founded in 1912 by Cumberland Posey, a black athlete who had attended Penn State. He kept his team out of the Negro Leagues because he rightfully felt he could make more money playing an independent schedule, going where the money was, two or three games a day, and sometimes picking up the best players from other teams for cameo performances.

  Money was tight during the Depression, but one industry in which blacks could participate was the numbers, the illegal lottery system with winners, losers, and runners on every corner. Gus Greenlee, who ran the Pittsburgh operation, did so well that in 1930 he took over the Pittsburgh Crawfords, a black team from the Hill District. Greenlee spent $100,000 to build his own stadium near his Crawford Bar and Grille, known for its food, music, and good times.

  In short order, Greenlee accumulated five players who would one day be initiated into the Baseball Hall of Fame: Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, and Cool Papa Bell. Gibson was born in Georgia but his father moved to Pittsburgh to work in the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Plant. The young man dropped out of school after the fifth grade to work in the mills and became a promising catcher at the age of nineteen. In 1930, the Grays' catcher, Buck Ewing, split a finger while catching a Sunday doubleheader against the touring Monarchs. The Grays sent across town for Gibson, who was playing against a white team, and he caught the second game. He was soon a legend, known as “Sampson.” Greenlee's wad of bills soon recruited Gibson to the Crawfords.