Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  Daley concluded the column by praising the sound and productive program of Rickey for Brooklyn, “where he promises after winning one pennant to win it seven out of every ten years thereafter.”

  The world of high finance, speculation, calculated risk, investment—all of this intrigued Rickey. In 1944, the heirs of Ed McKeever offered to sell their share in the Dodgers. Rickey joined with John L. Smith, the head of a chemical company, and a forty-year-old-Brooklyn attorney named Walter O’Malley, representing the Brooklyn Trust Company, to purchase the stock. The trio was brought together by George McLaughlin. The following year, the trio purchased another so percent of the team’s stock from the heirs of Charles Ebbets. By parlaying the sale of his Country Life Acres property that had been destroyed by fire in 1943, by cashing in some of his stock, by offering his life insurance as collateral, Rickey was able to become a 25 percent shareholder in the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  The underage farm system and the thin supply of existing major-league talent during those war years forced Rickey to patch the Brooklyn roster with an interesting assortment of spare parts and innovations.

  In August 1944, Rickey signed Ben Chapman. A former New York Yankee who had played in the same outfield with Babe Ruth irt the 1930s, Chapman was thirty-five years old. He had learned how to pitch as a member of the Richmond Colts and won five of eight decisions for Brooklyn in 1944. His path would cross with Rickey’s in the future.

  Two other former prime-time ballplayers made th ir way onto the war-years roster of Dodger retreads. The Waner brothers were known as “Big Poison” and “Little Poison” when they starred for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Paul, age forty, batted .311 for the 1943 Brooklyn team, appearing in half its games. In 1944, he was on the roster most of the season but saw limited action. Lloyd joined his brother Paul for a part of the 1944 season. “Branch Rickey called me just before the season began,” explained Lloyd. “He said he was going to lose two or three of his outfielders to the army and wanted me for insurance and wanted to know if I could get in shape.” Lloyd batted .286 in fifteen games for Brooklyn before being released at the June 15 cut-down time to his former Pittsburgh team.

  In July of 1945, the “Incredible Hoiman” was coaxed out of retirement in Glendale, California. Babe Herman, one of the madcap characters of the “Daffy Dodgers” of the 1930s, was forty-two years old, but he could still swing a bat and Rickey knew he was a crowd pleaser. Herman went nine for thirty-four as a pinch hitter finishing out the 1945 season with Brooklyn. He spent his last week out of uniform moving about gingerly on a bandaged knee with torn cartilage.

  The same year, Rickey unveiled the original pitching machine. Invented by Byron Moser, a St. Louis banker and friend of Rickey’s, the pitching machine was built on a principle similar to a crossbow.

  “The thing can throw twenty-five hundred baseballs a day,” Rickey bragged about the prolonged receptacle that had a baseball positioned against a rubber strip that was pulled back by electric power. “One pitcher averages one hundred twenty-five pitches in a nine-inning game,” continued Rickey, the baseball efficiency expert in him excited. “This equals twenty pitchers working nine innings. And it takes only one man to operate it—and he does not have to be a pitcher . . . or even a baseball player.”

  In conjunction with the Brooklyn Eagle,·Rickey launched a “Brooklyn Against the World” youth program. It was a move that capitalized on civic pride and created· thousands of new Dodger fans. Sandlot teams of kids from Brooklyn and Long Island competed against teams from all over the United States who were sponsored by their local newspapers. The innovation proved to be a great source of favorable newspaper coverage, and an economical way of scouting new talent.

  Late in 1945, when the Dodger organization had started to work out as Rickey had planned, Rickey was seized by a fit of dizziness and nausea while attending the major-league baseball meetings in Chicago. The symptoms were similar to those of a condition his brother Orla had died from, and that Rir:key’s mother had suffered through and survived. Rickey was examined in his hotel room by doctors who were unable to determine what was wrong with him but who agreed that he needed to rest and avoid stress.

  The next day, Rickey traveled by train to New York City, where he suffered a more severe attack and was rushed to Brooklyn Jewish Hospital for tests. The malady mystified the doctors. They agreed, though, that rest and quiet were essential to Rickey’s well-being. Finally, a top brain surgeon was brought in. He diagnosed the condition as Meniere’s disease—a disorder related to deafness. It was determined that Rickey had a breakdown of the eighth cranial nerve, rendering him virtually deaf in his left ear. The crass joke that developed was that to be on his good side, “stand on Mr. Rickey’s right side.”

  Like a caged tiger, Rickey impatiently spent two weeks in the hospital. When he was finally released, he was informed by doctors that stress and sudden moves of his body, especially his head, could provoke another attack. He was told to pace himself, to slow down.

  Rickey promised to slow down, but he couldn’t. He threw himself back into his varied projects, with a passion inspired by the time lost in the hospital. Early in 1946 he suffered a serious heart attack on the streets of Brooklyn not far from the Dodgers’ office at 215 Montague Street, but he bounced back and kept on pushing. He told himself he had promises to keep; there was a color line to break and a dynasty to build. “I just can’t slow down,” he told a friend. “I’d rather die ten minutes sooner than be doing nothing all the time. But I do hope than on some distant day in the future my funeral cortege will move at a leisurely pace.”

  The war’s end prompted him into more new beginnings. He activated the Montreal Royals franchise and designated it the top Dodger farm team. The Fort Worth club, acquired for $74,000 from the Texas League, became the Dodgers’ first wholly owned minor-league affiliate. The purchase price gave the Dodgers control of the franchise, its ballpark, and twenty-two acres of park and parking space. Working agreements were arranged with St. Paul and Mobile. The Dodger scouting staff expanded; Rickey’s brother Frank, a veteran of seventeen years of bird-dogging in the St. Louis organization, traveled all over the United States hunting for young talent.

  In Indian River County, one hundred miles north of Miami, a former naval air base lay abandoned since the end of the war. Rickey had read Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s book Crusade In Europe and was impressed by its emphasis on efficiency and teamwork on the battlefield. Purchasing the Vera Beach, Florida, facility and borrowing Eisenhower’s themes, Rickey created “Dodgertown,” a complex for processing a huge number of ballplayers. There were multiple batting diamonds, sliding pits, pitching machines for batting practice, supervised calisthenics, pitching strings, charts that indicated each player’s progress. All of this was part of the controlled frenzy that delighted Rickey, who sometimes shaved in taxi cabs, and who always abhorred any waste of time, money, or energy.

  As many as four hundred and fifty players could be put through their training at one time at a cost of under $300,000. “Every morning,” Duke Snider recalls, “Mr. Rickey used to give a forty-five-minute lecture. He covered every facet of the game and developed all types of drills. It was very intellectually and physically stimulating.”

  Rickey was as impressed with Snider as Snider was with him. “He’s going to be a great hitter,” said the man many thought was the greatest judge of talent in baseball history, “when he learns the strike zone is not high and outside.”

  To refine and discipline Snider’s raw hitting talent, Rickey developed a special drill. Snider was positioned in the batter’s box and was told not to swing but simply to stride at pitches. An umpire called out whether the pitch was a strike or a ball. “It was kind of tough,” remembers Snider, “but that’s where I learned to smooth out my swing, how to judge the strike zone, how to become the hitter I became.”

  Lou Napoli worked at Ebbets Field as a private attendant to Branch Rickey, and when the Dodgers were on the road did maintenance wor
k at the ballpark. When his wife gave birth to their second child, Napoli recalls, “I gave Mr. Rickey three Anthony and Cleopatra cigars. Those were the kind he smoked.”

  “’What’s this for, Lou?’ Mr. Rickey asked. I told him that we had a new baby in the family. Mr. Rickey never stayed to the end of a game; win or lose, he always left at the bottom of the eighth. He came over in the bottom of the eighth and he wrote me out a personal check, not a Dodger check, a personal check for five hundred dollars. ‘Here, Lou,’ he said, ‘give this to your wife for your baby daughter.’

  “About a month later my older daughter came to the ballpark. She saw Mr. Rickey. ‘I’d like to thank you for that wonderful gift you gave my baby sister,’ she said. Mr. Rickey put his arm around my shoulder. ‘Lou,’ he said smiling, ‘I always knew you were an honest man.’ “

  While Napoli and Snider remember Rickey with fond affection, others have less kind memories of the controversial executive:Rickey is recalled by Lee Scott, former traveling secretary for the Dodgers:

  “I had a lot of respect for his baseball knowledge, but as a person, Rickey was full of crap. He laid it on with that Judas Priest. He said he didn’t attend Sunday baseball, which he did; he said he didn’t drink, which he did occasionally.”

  Scott, Brooklyn born and rooted, recalls one of his first meetings with Rickey. “I was a little friendly with Walter O’Malley,” says Scott, who now lives in retirement in California not far from where Jackie Robinson grew up. “So I was able to get an appointment for a job interview with Rickey.

  “‘Lee,’ he said, ‘all the jobs are taken except one . . . and that’s in Decatur, Illinois. I know it’s far from home, but would you like that?’

  “’Mr. Rickey,’ Scott recalls responding, ‘you’re right. It is a little far. Incidentally, what would the salary be?’ “‘Thirty-six hundred dollars.’

  “I was making more than that as a writer and with a few other things,” Scott notes. “So I said, ‘I don’t think I’ll take it. Decatur is entirely too far away for me.’

  “And he said, ‘Well, Lee, I don’t think it was particularly appropriate for you anyway.’

  “Rickey was not my kind of guy,” Scott says with some emotion. “He thought anything he touched would turn to gold . . . he had that thing about money.”

  By the end of the 1946 season, Rickey had been with the Dodgers for five years. Sometimes he got lost on the subway or commuter trains or rode past his stop on the way home to Forest Hills. Occasionally, he found himself without pocket money, and he developed the dangerous habit of throwing lighted kitchen matches into the wastepaper basket in his Montague Street office. He still liked to play cards and passed much time at long games of hearts with his wife, Jane, and his cronies as he crisscrossed the country in his Beechcraft plane searching out new baseball talent. The old black notebook had been replaced by an index-card system containing the names of leading sandlot, high school, and college players in America. He had hired a statistician at a healthy $7,000 a year to travel with the Dodgers and chart pitches. Attendance at Ebbets Field in 1946 was almost two million. The Ebbets Field mortgage had finally been paid off. Sales of players that season brought in nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Television rights—a fairly new venture in baseball—earned the club an additional $6,000. Overall, the net profit of the Brooklyn Dodgers was nearly half a million dollars.

  Things were looking up on the field as well. The Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals tied for first place in 1946 with identical 96-58 records and met in the first playoff in National League history. It was Rickey versus Rickey, the team he had built pitted against the one he was building.

  In the first game in St. Louis, Joe Garagiola and Terry Moore each collected three hits as the Cardinals, behind Howie Pollet, defeated the Dodgers and Ralph Branca, 4-2. In the second game, the Cardinals pounded out thirteen hits off six Dodger pitchers, defeating Brooklyn 8-4 to sweep the two-game playoff and win the National League pennant. It was the fourth pennant in five years for the Cards, and St. Louis manager Eddie Dyer acknowledged Rickey’s role in the victory: “Mr. Rickey signed me as a pitcher in 1922 and when my arm went dead persuaded me to continue as an executive and taught me every bit of baseball I know. He got these players while he was still in St. Louis. If I’m a successful manager, it’s because he made me one.”

  Some said Rickey was secretly happy his former team prevailed, but the Mahatma was looking ahead, not back. “The Cardinals deserved to win this one,” he said, “but we will be the better team for a long time to come.”

  Chapter Six

  The Color Bar Drops

  When Rickey mentioned the possibility that “mass scouting might possibly come up with a Negro player or two” at the New York Athletic Club meeting back in January 1943, the comment was not just idle banter. On the contrary, it was part of a carefully conceived six-step plan for breaking baseball’s color barrier. He had accomplished step one at the meeting: gaining the support of the club’s owners. Step two was the selection of a player with exceptional talent. Step three was making certain that the player selected would have the character to deal with the difficulties he would encounter on and off the field. Step four was laying the groundwork for favorable press reaction. Step five was enlisting the assistance of the Negro community. The final step was securing acceptance of the Negro player by his teammates.

  Soon after the meeting, Rickey began his quest for “the one” who would break baseball’s color line. He dispatched his chief scouts: George Sisler, Wid Matthews, and Tom Greenwade. He enlisted the aid of two university professors: Dr. Robert M. Haig of Columbia University and Dr. Jose Seda of the University of Puerto Rico. Dr. Haig, an old Ohio Wesleyan fraternity brother of Rickey’s, visited Cuba and reported on the culture and capabilities of Cuban players, and Dr. Seda reported on players in Mexico and Puerto Rico. The search was under way.

  This effort took place against the backdrop of World War II. All over the globe battles raged between the forces of tyranny and the defenders of freedom. In the United States, great social changes were launched loose in the land, triggered by the 943 race riots in Harlem, Detroit, and Beaumont, Texas.

  President Roosevelt issued Order 8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Communist groups sought to capitalize on growing racial unrest and engaged in picketing, petitioning, and pamphleteering efforts in attempts to widen the schism between the races. Black activists and white liberals helped escalate the pressures. Political campaign rhetoric underscored the social upheaval.

  The chafing pressures of racial tension in the United States in those years were symbolized by the Harlem riots in 1943. A white policeman had wounded a black soldier, precipitating the street violence. Most of Harlem was declared off limits to servicemen by Mayor La Guardia. The New York City mayor also formed a Committee on Unity aimed at keeping racial tension down to a minimum and preventing potential violence. Charles Evan Hughes, son of the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, headed the committee that consisted of nineteen other prominent New Yorkers. Dr. Dan Dodson, a professor of sociology at New York University, was the organization’s executive director.

  Lily-white baseball became a prime target of the socially conscious. One brochure of the time depicted a dead black soldier and bore the caption “Good enough to die for his country . . . not good enough for organized baseball.”

  In December 1943 at the winter baseball meetings, the famous black singer-activist Paul Robeson led a delegation that met with Commissioner Landis and urged the admission of black players into the majors. Unofficially, Robeson was told that the American public was not ready to accept integrated baseball. Robeson, who was then appearing on the New York stage in the role of Othello, responded, “They said America never would stand for my playing Othello with a white cast, but it is the triumph of my life.”

  After the meeting, Landis issued a statement: ‘’Each club is entirely free to employ Negro players to any and all extents
it desires. The matter is solely for each club’s decision, without restriction whatsoever.” The statement was a public relations puff. “We knew it was mere rhetoric,” says Mal Goode, who was to become the first black network news correspondent. “But back then, all we could do was ask; we couldn’t demand.”

  Through his two decades as commissioner, Landis had strongly opposed breaking baseball’s color line. In 1921, as a newly named commissioner, he forbade players to wear major-league uniforms in exhibition games against Negro teams. He hoped that this would hide the fact that many major-league teams lost to the Negro clubs. “In 1938,” recalls Goode, “the two managing editors of the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest black newspaper in the world, met with Kenesaw Mountain. He said that the time wasn’t right for blacks in baseball. ‘You do whatever you want,’ he told them. In those days, they would say to you, ‘Boycott if you want, we don’t care.’ There weren’t that many blacks going to major-league games.” In the early years of World War II, Bill Veeck planned to purchase the Phillies and stock the roster with black players. “We could have run away with the pennant,” recalls Veeck. Landis allegedly learned of the plan and squashed it. “I realize now that it was a mistake to tell him,” notes Veeck.

  Nonetheless, by May 1944 the last traces of segregation had been eliminated in the major-league stands, if not on the fields. The St. Louis Browns and St. Louis Cardinals did away with the segregated section in the right-field pavilion at Sportsman’s Park. Equality among spectators had been achieved; the pressure kept building for equality on the playing field.

  At the time, the only outlets for black baseball players were the existing Negro Leagues, the Negro National and American leagues. Each league had six teams that played approximately 110 games each season, which lasted from May through Labor Day. Many of them played in majorleague stadiums when the home team was on the road. The Homestead Grays, for example, played at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh when the Pirates were on the road. This arrangement netted additional profits for white owners for use of their otherwise idle stadiums; after expenses the Negro clubs got just 40 percent of the gross. When major-league stadiums were not available, small-town ballparks were used instead. Black players were underpaid and suffered arduous bus trips and hard living conditions during the baseball season.