Branch Rickey

by Jimmy Breslin

  Rickey got to the ballpark by taking the new subway, which then went only as far as 137th Street, and boarding a horsecar for the rest. He got off that cart the first time with an arm that felt leaden and achy. Twinges turned into full pain when he tried to throw. The team put him in anyway; they didn’t have another catcher. Early in Rickey’s first game somebody tried to steal on him. Rickey threw into right field. Thirteen runners stole bases on him that day. Soon he didn’t even try throwing. That sent him back to his new wife, the former Jane Moulton, who was a long bus ride away in Ohio.

  Back home, he lived life in a constant rush. He coached baseball at Ohio Wesleyan and took law-school classes at night at Ohio State University, forty miles and more away. When his favorite teacher at Ohio Wesleyan became ill, he took over the man’s class in elementary law and refused to accept any money, assuring that the teacher’s family could continue to receive his salary.

  For an immensely powerful man, he was vulnerable to tuberculosis and Ménière’s disease of the inner ear. He ignored the first serious symptoms of illness while throwing himself into the 1908 presidential campaign of William Howard Taft, also from Ohio. Signs of exhaustion began coming earlier each day. Still, he drove through nights to stand on boxes in town squares in Portsmouth and Chillicothe and Akron, and to praise Taft to the heavens. He made sure to include a snide attack on the drink. His sponsor for this part of the show came from some Ohio Anti-Saloon League. Soon the coughing had him spitting blood. The first country doctor he saw said it was tuberculosis. At this time in America, in a survey taken in 1905, some 10 percent of deaths were caused by TB.

  The illness left Rickey on the ground, bundled in blankets, breathing the freezing night air in a sanitarium at Saranac Lake, a mountain slum in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. The hospital was founded by a doctor, Edward Livingston Trudeau, who had lived with a brother who came down with tuberculosis. They shut themselves in a dark airless room because the wisdom of the time was that fresh air would make you cough yourself to death. Of course the airless room killed Trudeau’s brother and soon sent the doctor, sick and wheezing, to the mountains so he would have some scenery while dying. When the mountain air saved him, he was so thankful that he established his sanitarium there. Rickey became a patient and he, too, survived.

  While he was recovering, he received an admissions letter from the University of Michigan Law School. He left Saranac with a song in his throat. “It was a complete cure,” Rickey announced upon his return to Michigan.

  Photographs show that when Rickey got to Ann Arbor after his tuberculosis treatment at Saranac, he reached for a big cigar to celebrate. He smoked these cigars for the next half century. Sometimes they stayed unlit and were comfortable props. But sometimes they were steaming; a photo on a book jacket shows his face covered with smoke.

  At that time, famous people were paid to show you how to smoke stylishly, and kept cancer a myth. The newspapers and radio shows and the sports teams all were tied in with the tobacco companies. Drive somewhere and the billboards featured movie stars who looked good smoking. It was called a miracle in engineering when out of a huge Camel cigarette billboard in Times Square there came perfect smoke rings maybe three stories high blown from the mouth of a delighted smoker. Thousands each day stood in the street to watch the smoke rings come into the air. They learned to hate the wind.

  People died frightful deaths of cancer, but newspaper obits told only of “a lengthy illness.” Cancer was the secret word all the way to 1946 when Damon Runyon died of throat cancer at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in Manhattan. A fight manager, Eddie Walker, took a call in the hallway from Joseph Hertzberg, city editor of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. “What was the cause of death?” Hertzberg asked.

  “Cancer,” Eddie Walker said.

  The word appeared in the paper in the morning and became the first time that anybody famous was listed as dying of the disease. Runyon, who put so many phrases into the American language, now took one out. “Lengthy illness” was gone.

  Rickey’s influence on others might have been wasted, you can argue, by his overrating the damage done by alcohol. If you made a list of all the earthly evils, drink might wind up near the bottom. Smoke, greed, and envy are at the top. Rickey never understood the relaxation that accompanied a cold beer at a bar. Or a big drink of whiskey at the end of another day that had allowed no pleasure. Alcohol at its worst hurts people. Cancer still kills.

  Instead, Rickey’s sport was sponsored by P. Lorillard, makers of Old Gold cigarettes. A home run was called “An Old Goldie.” As the runner went around the bases after hitting one, a carton of Old Golds tumbled down the netting behind home plate. A batboy ran up, snatched the carton of smokes, and ran it to the players’ dugout. As a prize, the home run hitter was given a shot at lung cancer.

  I am in the city room of the old New York Herald Tribune and writing to my rhythm: go to the coffee container on the left and then to the black Underwood typewriter in the middle. The words are painful and as I read them a robot hand goes to the right, to a smoking Pall Mall on the edge of the desk. You take the cigarette, then study the last words through the exhaled smoke. You put it together—coffee, two-finger typing, Pall Mall—you have my assembly line.

  This woman is in the front of the room staring at me. She is just coming from seeing the editors on some matter. Suddenly she walks past desks and comes up to me.

  “Hello, I’m Mary McLaughlin. I’m the health commissioner.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I just want to say one thing. How many cigarettes are you smoking?”

  “Two packs.” I lie. I smoke three packs of Pall Malls every day. Two for work. And then I need a full pack on the bar in front of me after work.

  “Would you mind if I told you one thing? You would be better off on a one-hundred-fifty-dollar-a-day heroin habit than you are now.”

  She was a civilized woman. She made her point and did not show off. She left me retching over cigarettes that I could not quit until I caught a flu and missed work for the only time in my life, for three days, and then I bought cigarettes on Myrtle Avenue and I took the first drag and my chest heaved and I threw up. I have not had a cigarette since that moment. Oh, it was a miracle. 1968.

  Rickey finished law school near the top of his class. The university’s athletic department offered him a job, which he turned down because he was about to open a law practice in Boise, Idaho, with two fraternity brothers from Ohio Wesleyan. He wanted Boise because he was sure the cold air would benefit his health. And he even had a client. He was assigned to defend somebody who, as Rickey recalled, “was charged with more crimes than I thought could be committed by one person.” Years later, Rickey was having lunch at the Union League Club in Manhattan when an old man came to his table and said, “I’m Judge Davis of Boise, Idaho. Just wanted to shake your hand. I heard your first case and you lost it.” The judge thought this was great sport, having something over on a big guy. His appearance was evidence of why they should have extensive psychiatric testing for people to whom you allow power. The client in Boise also seems to be the only one in memory. Rickey did not even have a nice old widow to advise.

  He soon wired the Michigan athletic department: “Am starving. Will be back without delay.”

  He returned to Michigan as baseball coach, arriving just in time to interview incoming student-athletes, including one who changed his life. Rickey recounted his first meeting with this young man to his assistant, Arthur Mann:Candidates for several varsity baseball teams were reporting for registration, assignment and tryout. Here before me stood a handsome boy of 18 with dark brown hair, serious gray eyes, and good posture. He was about five feet eight or nine, well built but not heavy, and he wore a somewhat battered finger glove on his right hand. He said he pitched on a high school team in Akron, Ohio, and that he was George Sisler, engineering student in the freshman class.

  “Oh, a freshman,” I said. “Well, this part of the program
is only for the varsity.” He showed extreme disappointment. I said, “You can’t play this year, but you can work out with the varsity today.”

  The undergraduate news gathering of The Michigan Daily was at its best in the spring of 1912 when its stringer covering intramural sports was present at a game in which the freshman engineering students played the school’s varsity. The game became famous because of the pitcher for the freshman engineers. The newspaper proclaimed his pitching success under this old-time headline style:UNEARTH ‘FIND’ IN INTERCLASS GAME

  Sisler, Freshman Engineer, Twirls for Seven Innings and Strikes Out Twenty Men

  The next time Sisler pitched, students came running from all over campus to watch. When they got to the baseball field, they found Rickey, who plainly did not want to be bothered while he was doing the important work of measuring Sisler’s ability. The more Rickey watched him pitch, the deeper grew his belief that this boy was for the ages. Added to this, Sisler could hit. Rickey admitted later that he almost fainted with excitement. Sisler was still a freshman and ineligible to play on the varsity until his second year. So he was out of Rickey’s hands when he went home for the summer and met with a scout, which was worse than finding a serious girl.

  “Did you ever sign anything?” Rickey asked him.

  “No,” said Sisler. “Just some letter saying I’d pitch for this Akron team.”

  “Did he pay you?”

  “No, I said I didn’t want money right now. So I didn’t really sign anything.”

  “Yes, you did,” Rickey said. “A baseball contract.”

  Rickey opened his law books and proclaimed that all of America’s youth would be endangered if such cradle robbing were allowed. “You must not force recognition of this illegal contract,” Rickey told the commissioner of baseball at the time. “If you do this you will forever alienate parents and colleges and even high schools.”

  Before long, Rickey was hired as manager of the St. Louis Browns baseball team. Of course he brought George Sisler along with him. Henrietta Slote of the University of Michigan Law School states today that it is the school’s belief that Branch Rickey’s theft of Sisler “dwarfs the Jackie Robinson business.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Branch Rickey invented the baseball farm system, which gathered players of promise and grew them, like crops, on minor league teams, or farm clubs. The practice was modeled somewhat after the Southern system of slavery, but that was all right because it was baseball and the sport had its own quaint beliefs. It was in Alabama in 1913 that Rickey and the St. Louis Browns owner, Colonel Bob Hedges, got four Montgomery businessmen together and bought the local baseball team. The agreement was that Rickey and Hedges would stock the team with prospects. At season’s end, they could buy the contracts of as many players as they liked, each for $1,000. This was a small amount of money to pay for seasoned players—too small, one of the team owners said. As this man was operating in the state capital, he leaned heavily to larceny. When Rickey and Hedges discovered they were objects of an attempted robbery, they dropped the arrangement.

  St. Louis at this time had the most inept baseball players gathered in one place since the invention of foul lines. The Browns lost 99 games in one season. Their crosstown rivals, the Cardinals, were worse. Out of carnage like this arises great opportunity. The owner of the Cardinals, Mrs. Helene Britton, stood in her bedroom one night and considered her life. She didn’t want to face the next morning because all her team did was lose. She looked around at her husband, Schuyler Britton. He was in pajamas. She despised him. She despised him worse than she did losing baseball games.

  The following day, Mrs. Britton sent a team of divorce lawyers into court to start proceedings. Later, a second group of lawyers and financial people were told to find a buyer for the Cardinals. She never wanted to see the team or her husband again. It was a parlay that made her life easier.

  Soon the Browns were sold to one Phil Ball, who replaced Rickey as manager not long after Rickey returned from overseas. His baseball career had been interrupted in 1918 by World War I, during which he served as an officer in the 1st Gas Regiment, a chemical-assault unit. Ball’s decision opened the way for Rickey to go across the street to the Cardinals. He ran that franchise for the next seventeen years.

  From the start he went right back to his notion of a farm system. On behalf of the Cardinals, he bought teams all over the country. Year in and out he signed players until he had 650 minor league prospects stocking teams of varying heft from Houston, Texas, to Syracuse, New York, to Topeka, Kansas, and points in between. Creating an army of prospects from which he could replenish the roster of the big-league team, Branch Rickey changed the look of baseball long before he ever heard of Jackie Robinson, so much so that Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s commissioner, became Rickey’s mortal enemy.

  In one ruling, Landis said no player signed by a major league team could be sent to the minors until he had been given a thorough tryout right at the end of spring training. Rickey howled. The rule stayed. There were more such rules inspired by Rickey’s farm system, which was generally known as “The Chain Gang.” Players were bought and sold and assigned to teams without being asked. Not everyone was unhappy about it. The opinion of many sports people was, “These players are being taken out of the gas station and being paid to play. Who are they to complain about anything?”

  Branch Rickey was neither a savior nor a samaritan. He was a baseball man, and nowhere in his religious training did he take a vow of poverty. There came a day in St. Louis that he looked at his famous first baseman, Johnny Mize, who could hit a ball several miles. Mize had led the league in batting and slugging. That he ran quite slowly was a drawback, except the Cardinals had so much speed that the team could accommodate a man with no feet. But then Rickey saw that Mize had developed a new flaw: he had grown an agent.

  “John loves playing in St. Louis,” the agent said to Rickey. “If he could just get what he deserves.”

  Though the Cardinals might have needed Mize’s bat, Rickey now saw only a player who wanted more money than he was worth. Seeking to jettison Mize, he approached New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham, a restless drunk whom Rickey found sufferable only because whiskey made the man vulnerable.

  “Johnny Mize would add glory to the spires of New York,” he assured Stoneham. In truth, the last thing the Giants needed was an infielder who lumbered. Rickey spoke of the glories of Mize until he had sold the player to Stoneham for $50,000, of which 10 percent went to Rickey. This was above Rickey’s salary of $50,000.

  He got that 10 percent commission on nearly every player he sold, and he sold hundreds of them, for price tags from a few thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. In the records, there are notices of sales for Bob Bowman ($35,000) and Charles Wilson ($59,000) and Nate Andrews ($7,500) and Don Padgett ($35,000), and you could sit there all night totaling these sales figures, with 10 percent off the top for Rickey. He made his biggest sale in 1938, to Chicago chewing-gum maker Phil Wrigley, when he unloaded one of the greatest players he ever managed.

  “Answer me this,” Rickey asked his wife, Jane, one night when he came home for dinner. “Would you say I am somewhat intelligent? Would you say that as a result of Ohio Wesleyan and Michigan Law School that I am fairly well educated? Then why did I exhaust myself for four hours today with a person named Dizzy?”

  Jerome Dean was a big, loose kid who ran out to the mound in the Shawnee, Oklahoma, tryout camp of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was six foot four and it appeared that he might be able to throw fast. This was late in the 1930 season. He would have been there earlier except the Cardinals’ scout for his region, Don Curtis, worked only part-time for the baseball team and full-time with the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, and he was sorry but the rail schedule didn’t allow him time to watch the kid pitch for the San Antonio Power and Light Company and bring him around until now.

  Rickey, with a floppy canvas hat covering him from the sun, leaned forward to get
a better look as Dean took the mound. A line of batters, hoping desperately to get the hits that would bring a contract, waited to face him.

  On the mound, Jerome Dean raised his leg and threw. The first pitch was a fastball. He threw eight more to make three outs. Nobody even got a foul tip.

  Rickey spoke quietly. Keep this kid out there for the next three batters. They did. Dean threw nine more strikes and still nobody touched the ball. Rickey’s face and voice revealed nothing. Inside, he was experiencing the sensation that ran through him when he first saw George Sisler pitch and then swing a bat. If he said out loud what he was thinking now, that we are dealing here with a star who looks like he will still be a name in the next century, somebody would tell this kid and the first thing the kid would do is demand a freight car full of money. And Rickey couldn’t have that.

  He signed Dean for money suitable for counting on a candy-store counter and sent him to St. Joseph, Missouri, in the Western League. Dean won twenty-six games and was in St. Louis by the end of the season.

  “Just tell the boys to get a couple of runs and I’ll take care of the rest,” he announced. That happened. They let him pitch and in his first major league game he suffered misfortune by allowing three Pirates to get hits. At the hotel late that night he inspected the top paper on a bundle of first editions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Damn!” he called out as he saw his picture big and smiling on the first page.