Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  One thinks of a memorable line Budd Schulberg wrote in another context. Except for bigotry, the now forgotten Silvio Garcia “coulda been a contender.”

  Rickey told me he spent “about $30,000" scouting ballplayers around the Caribbean. “That also cost me time and effort,” he said. “In the end it only demonstrated that the best Negro ballplayers for my purpose were playing in the United States.”

  My recorded conversation with Rickey that the Herald Tribune published in 1954 drew considerable attention. Among those pleased with the story was Rickey himself. “My door is always open for you,” he said afterward, “any time you want to visit for a talk.” Early the next season, in Pittsburgh, I took him up on the offer. I wanted to discuss scouting; I wanted to learn as much as I could about the methodology that led him to Jackie Robinson. He would oblige, but first the man Red Smith called a checkers shark tried an amiable hustle. We were sitting in a private compartment in the low-ceilinged press box at Forbes Field watching a shaky Pirate team play the Dodgers. With Roberto Clemente in right field and Dick Groat at shortstop, these Pirates had potential, but that year there wasn’t a single .300 hitter on the club.

  “Wouldn’t it be a fine thing to bring Sid Gordon home,” Rickey began. Gordon was an experienced outfielder with good power, a fine arm and not much running speed. “You know he was born in Brooklyn.” He knew that. I also knew Gordon was Jewish. A Jewish slugger from Brooklyn hitting home runs in Ebbets Field had great box office potential. But I also knew that Gordon was 38 years old.

  “I imagine he could have some good days with that short wall out in left field.”

  “And right center,” Rickey said. “He still has plenty of power to all fields.” Rickey was hard at work planting a story, which he hoped I would write under a headline about like this:

  SID GORDON AVAILABLE FOR RIGHT

  OFFER, RICKEY SAYS; VETERAN SLUGGER

  WOULD HELP DODGERS WIN PENNANT

  That could generate pressure from fans on the Dodger front office and help along a sale that would put a fresh deposit into Rickey’s bankbook. I said I would use a Gordon item in the notes that followed my regular Dodger story. Rickey seemed satisfied. He had made his pitch and if I wasn’t buying all of it, at least I was paying attention. A few weeks later Rickey sold Gordon’s contract to the New York Giants for $40,000. Gordon hit only .243 for the 1955 Giants in what was his final season in the major leagues. (Ten years later he died of a heart attack at the age of 57, stricken while chasing a long fly in a softball game in Central Park. His career total of 202 home runs places Sid Gordon fourth, after Hank Greenberg, Shawn Green and Ryan Braun, among all Jewish-born major-league sluggers, past and present.)

  Rickey had profound ideas on the art and science of scouting. Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodger general manager for 17 seasons, told me shortly before his death in 2008, “Without question Mr. Rickey was the greatest scout who ever lived. He is really the father, or grandfather, of modern scouting.”

  That day in Pittsburgh, Rickey talked scouting at length. His thought processes were vivid. His phrasing was extraordinary. Almost everything he said was new to me, at least in the way he said it. I didn’t know then that he had made many of the same points many times in closed meetings when he was running the Brooklyn Dodgers. Perhaps that’s why the phrasing was so smooth.

  Al Campanis, who succeeded Bavasi as general manager of the Dodgers, tape-recorded Rickey’s dissertations and preserved the cassettes in an old shoe box, which he kept locked in his desk at Dodger Stadium. “The spirit of Branch Rickey still stirs in these offices,” Campanis said when I was visiting in 1985 with my late son, Roger Laurence Kahn. Campanis peered into his shoe box and considered the labels. Then he read aloud:

  “Luck Is the Residue of Design.

  “Is What We Are Doing Worthwhile?

  “Intestinal Fortitude.

  “The Cure Is Sweat.

  “Thou Shalt Not Steal (Defensively).

  “Thou Shalt Steal (Offensively).

  “Does He Like to Play?”

  Lecture titles for a postdoctoral course in the game of baseball.

  “Do you have your managers, coaches and scouts listen to these tapes?” I asked.

  “Damn right,” Campanis said. “Every year. And I listen to them myself, too, about every six months. Mr. Rickey was the master. He’s still teaching all of us, 35 years after these talks were recorded”—and more than 60 years later as I write these lines.

  When we talked scouting Rickey asserted that there were three fundamentals, the arm, the legs and power. “You look at a boy and say, ‘Can he throw?’ Sometimes, particularly with outfielders, you have to watch many games to get an answer. Outfielders can go for a week without having to make an important throw. But this is primarily can he or can’t he. If a boy can’t throw at 18 he won’t throw much at 28. You may tinker a little with grip and mechanics, such as arm angle, but not significantly. Either a prospect has a strong arm, or he doesn’t. Look at the Brooklyn man in right field now [Carl Furillo]. He’s about 30 years old, am I right, and famous throughout baseball for his arm. The base runners take no liberties with him. Well, I’ll guarantee he had the great arm he has today when he was just a prospect, 10 years ago. I’ll guarantee a good scout looking at him then would report, ‘This man is armed.’ Am I going too fast for you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “With hitting I look for power.”

  “Batting average?” I said.

  “No, no, no,” Rickey said. “So many things affect a .300 hitter. The ballpark. The skill of the defenders. The strike zone of individual umpires. Now that boy out in center [Duke Snider] came to me at Bear Mountain with a magnificent, natural swing. That translated into tremendous power. But there was a problem. He had not learned the strike zone. He was a headstrong youngster, very willful and self-involved. I told him repeatedly and sternly that if he ever wanted to make the major leagues he would have to stop swinging at bad pitches. High and outside. He swung at everything high and outside the strike zone, swung at everything, swung and missed. So I ordered him to stand in the batter’s box with a bat while I had a succession of pitchers throw. I told the young man, ‘You may not swing. You are simply to call each pitch, ball or strike.’ He pouted but obeyed. That went on for days, weeks. The Yankees scouted him carefully and in the 1949 World Series fed him bad pitches and made him look dreadful. He batted less than .200. But learning is an ongoing process and the last time he was in the World Series [1952] he batted about .350 and hit four home runs. The power was always there. That’s why we invested so much teaching time in a headstrong young man. Today, as you know, he’s a star.”

  “And still headstrong,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” Rickey said. “But he seems to have learned that the strike zone is not high and outside.

  “My third fundamental is a pair of fast legs. Foot speed. If I were to write four units on a blackboard, I would give two to the legs and one to arm and one to power. The arm is used only defensively, no matter what the position. Power is used only on offense. But the legs are much in evidence offensively and defensively.

  “Do you know that speed forces errors? When a slow man hits the ball to deep shortstop the fielder takes his time and throws him out. When a fast man hits a similar ball the shortstop has to hurry, and in hurrying may throw the ball away.

  “My ideal team is fast and young. My ideal pitching staff is intelligent and seasoned.

  “What I look for first in a pitcher is size. Christy Mathewson—he and I served together in France during the First World War—is my favorite among all pitchers and he is remembered today for poise, the fade-away [the modern screwball] and for his remarkable control. But don’t forget that Matty was a big, strong man, well over six feet tall. So was Walter Johnson. So was Dizzy Dean. Every one over six feet.

  “If I have to name a favorite pitch it would be the overhand curve. Thrown properly—watch Carl Erskine—it breaks straight down, making
it equally effective against right- and left-handed batters. A flat curve breaks along the plane of the bat so the hitter has a significant stretch of wood with which to make contact. But against the overhand curve he has only the diameter of the bat and inside that diameter only an inch or so that will produce a solid drive.

  “But picking a favorite pitch is an incomplete approach, since pitches come in sequences. Each pitch relates to what has gone before. If you are going to throw three curveballs in a row, the second one has to be better than the first and the third one has to be better than the second. One of my favorite pitchers, now a coach, Whitlow Wyatt, says simply, ‘The best pitch in baseball is a strike.’” A laugh rumbled up from Rickey’s chest. “‘Simply.’ I used that word didn’t I? But a strike is seldom a simple pitch.”

  The Rickey papers are stored in 131 boxes in a warehouse at the Library of Congress, and it was there that I found a brief and succinct example of Rickey’s pitching acumen. Subject: The highly neurotic but just about incomparable Sandy Koufax. As Rickey viewed him in a memo written in 1960:

  This boy comes nearest to perfection in pitching as anyone in either of the major leagues at the present time. He has more speed than [Warren] Spahn and almost perfect control of a slow curve that really curves. A daunting combination for even the finest hitter. He has an exceptional fastball and occasionally throws a change-up off that fastball. He has four different pitches that he can throw for strikes on any occasion. Perhaps the best thing about Koufax is that he is a good thinker and uses all four, three of them [not the straight change] constantly.

  This fellow has so much stuff and has such perfect control that I am compelled to think the hitter’s best hope is swinging at the “cripple,” the 3 and 0 pitch. But Koufax does not go to 3 and 0 often. Like Mathewson long before him, he is not likely to walk anybody.

  A catcher from the Bronx, the late Bob Berman, once told an interviewer that Rickey was going to sign him for the St. Louis Cardinals in the spring of 1917 but changed his mind. “He was interested,” Berman said, “until he found out I was Jewish. That killed the deal.” Berman then signed with the Washington Senators.

  Ezra Pound ultimately called this sort of generic response “stupid suburban anti-Semitism.” For decades it was endemic in baseball and American society at large. A touch of it colors some of Christy Mathewson’s memoir, Pitching in a Pinch, and invades passages of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and even the famous Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises. I can testify personally that Rickey bested any suburban anti-Semitism within him during his later years, and indeed reached out to Jewish people after the revelation of the Holocaust. “How,” he asked in a moving speech, “among Christian nations could such a thing be?” But a curious question remains. After the young pitcher’s dazzling tryout with the Pirates at Forbes Field in 1954, why didn’t Rickey sign Sandy Koufax on the spot?

  Koufax was born in Brooklyn to Evelyn and Jack Braun, but his parents divorced when he was three. Six years later Evelyn married an accountant named Irving Koufax, whose name young Sandy assumed. Divorce was infrequent and considered somewhat immoral in Bensonhurst, the staid Jewish community where the family lived. (For some years Koufax concealed his family history.)

  Sandy starred in basketball at Lafayette High and for an amateur baseball team in the Coney Island Sports League, run by a man named Milton Secol, nicknamed “Pop.” Informally the organization was called the Ice Cream League. Later Koufax enrolled at the University of Cincinnati, hoping to become an architect, but sports continued to hold him in its thrall. He made the baseball varsity as a freshman. Mostly with his fastball, he struck out 51 batters in 31 innings.

  Now word spread through baseball about the Brooklyn kid with the blazer. Koufax tried out for the Giants at the Polo Grounds but later said he was so nervous he forgot to bring his glove. He was wild and the Giants took a pass. Then he traveled to Forbes Field, where Rickey watched with his favorite scout, Clyde Sukeforth. Another Rickey favorite, a former Cardinal catcher named Sam Narron, crouched behind the plate. Koufax threw harder and harder until a fastball broke Sam Narron’s thumb—a thumb that was protected by a catcher’s mitt. Rickey said quietly to Sukeforth, “This is the finest arm I’ve ever seen.” After a bit Sukeforth told Koufax, “Mr. Rickey is thinking of a generous signing package. Something like $15,000.”

  The Ice Cream League star said he would have to think about it. He went back to Brooklyn and tried out for the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. Al Campanis, then the Dodgers’ chief scout, took a stance in the batter’s box when Koufax was ready to pitch. He memorably described what happened next. “Only twice in my life,” Campanis told me, “has the hair on the back of my neck literally stood up straight. The first time was when I saw Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The second time was when I saw Sandy Koufax’s fastball.”

  Today a legion of agents would come marching up to the door of a young pitcher with an electric arm and set up a bidding war at once. But this was happening during the mid-1950s, when baseball executives refused to talk to agents. The Dodgers quickly cobbled an offer together: a $6,000 signing bonus and a salary of $14,000. In short, a $20,000 package. Under the rules of the time any bonus over $5,000 meant that the player was guaranteed a spot on the major-league team for at least two seasons. Like Bob Feller before him, Koufax would skip the endless bus rides of the minor leagues. Besides, as Koufax and his stepfather saw matters, the $20,000 would cover tuition through architectural college if the baseball career fizzled. And wouldn’t it be a fine thing to play big-league ball not far from the Flat-bush fields of the old Ice Cream League?

  As far as I know Sandy Koufax, apprentice architect, never did design a building. And two years after Sandy joined the Dodgers, Walter O’Malley hustled the franchise, including Koufax, out of Brooklyn to California, where superstardom awaited the intense left-hander. “In all the years I was working in Brooklyn,” O’Malley subsequently told me during an amiable lunch at Perino’s Restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, “I would have given my right arm for a star Jewish ballplayer. What that would have done for our gate.

  “I come out here where I could fill the ballpark with nine fucking Chinamen, and what do I get? Koufax.” O’Malley laughed genially. Then he said, “Remember, you promised to pick up the lunch check.”

  As for Branch Rickey, in this instance he struck out. For the man who signed Jackie Robinson is also the man who failed to sign Sandy Koufax.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  WITH LANDIS’S DEATH LATE in 1944, a primary obstacle to integrating baseball was interred. As New York State’s fair employment bill began moving through the legislative process, the path to integration was being secured. The men who directed the major leagues—Red Smith described them as “the fatheads who run baseball”—began to realize that the times were changing and possibly, just possibly, they might have to change as well.

  Imperious to the end, Commissioner Landis directed St. Luke’s, the Chicago hospital where he lay dying, to issue only upbeat bulletins. “The judge is doing fine.” Sam Breadon visited in early November and reported, “The judge’s mind is as sharp as ever.” A few days later a committee including Breadon, Rickey and Ford Frick, president of the National League, recommended offering Landis a new seven-year term as commissioner. What that would have done to Rickey’s developing integration plans is a good question. It became moot in the early hours of Saturday, November 25, 1944, though, when Landis died peacefully within an oxygen tent.

  Uncertainty followed, along with a wild scramble for Landis’s job. Candidates lobbied hard to become the second baseball commissioner, a job that paid $50,000 a year, five times the salary of a United States senator at the time. The suitors formed a cavalcade of sporting-life celebrities: hard-nosed J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI; liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas; the essentially conservative New York governor, Thomas E. Dewey; Franklin Roosevelt’s pragmatic aide James A. Farley (a one-time semi-pro first baseman); and Ford Frick, who eventuall
y would become commissioner but not just yet. Most media people were surprised in April 1945 when the owners plucked from the ranks of the United States Senate one Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, an ambitious, cornpone politician from rural Kentucky. After meeting him, Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror wrote, “There is an astonishing contrast between straight-laced, stern Judge Landis and his ebullient, sophomoric successor, Senator Chandler.”

  Chandler opened an office in a Cincinnati skyscraper and, when receiving visitors, liked to point across the Ohio River. “Kaintucky,” he would say. “God’s country.” The contrived down-home country boy manner so irritated Red Smith that Smith began referring in his columns to the new commissioner as “A. Benny Chandler.” Not easily squelched, Chandler took to calling the newspaperman “Whiskey-head Smith.” (Smith liked to drink but almost always handled the hard stuff well.)

  In his later years Chandler portrayed himself as a champion of integration and in truth he did nothing to block Rickey’s plan. But during the presidential election of 1948, Chandler supported a fiery racist candidate, the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.

  During the interregnum between Landis and Chandler the owners created a so-called Major League Committee on Baseball Integration. Its members were Rickey, Sam Lacy, a black Philadelphia magistrate named Joseph Rainey, and Larry MacPhail, who had just bought the Yankees (with two multimillionaire partners: copper heir Dan Topping, a former husband of the lusty movie actress Arline Judge, and Del Webb, whose construction company built the rickety camps in which Japanese Americans were confined during World War II). Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the integration committee is this: It never met.