Rickey and Robinson (18 page)

Chapter Nine

The Mahatma in Charge

The 1947 World Series was the last hurrah for one of baseball’s most colorful characters. Larry MacPhail, whose baseball roots went back to the St. Louis Cardinals’ Columbus farm team, resigned from the Yankees and baseball in his greatest moment of glory. Exultant in victory, the redheaded Yankee president forgot his differences with his former boss over breaking baseball’s color line. MacPhail approached Rickey with a conciliatory gesture “for old times’ sake.” Rickey rebuffed him. “I will be civil because people are watching,” he said, “but I don’t want you to ever speak to me again.”

The extent of Rickey’s enmity to MacPhail went beyond the Dodson’s Committee on Unity and their differences on race relations. Rickey held MacPhail personally responsible for ruining Pete Reiser. During a Cardinal-Dodger game in 1942, the irrepressible Reiser crashed head first into a concrete wall attempting to make a catch. Cardinal doctors examined Reiser and advised rest. MacPhail thought the advice was a plot to keep the hard-hitting outfielder out of the Dodger lineup. He rushed Reiser back into service too soon. There was more damage; there were more rips and tears on the Reiser body. “Pistol Pete” went into the armed forces, and when he returned he was never the same. Rickey maintained that when he originally sent Reiser to MacPhail back in 1938, when he was to be submerged in the minors, he had entrusted MacPhail with a rare talent. MacPhail’s negligence had ruined him. To Rickey, this was unforgivable.

In a speech at Wilberforce University in 1948, Rickey revealed another reason for his anger toward MacPhail. He charged that early in 1946, club owners voted 15-1 against admitting Negroes into major-league baseball “just yet.” MacPhail was chairman of the policy committee that engineered the vote. The report in which the vote was contained was never published. MacPhail denied any anti-black commentary was included in the report; Rickey asserted it was. Indeed, he maintained that MacPhail made a speech accusing him of ruining baseball. MacPhail said there were enough blacks coming to see games, and if more came whites would stay away, creating a disaster for organized basebalL “Mr. Rickey, at first, wanted to answer MacPhail,” Professor Dodson remembers, “but he later told me it was all water under the bridge and they can’t pour it back.”

One day after the 1947 World Series, MacPhail sold his interest in the Yankees to Del Webb and Dan Topping. Baseball was to hear from him no more. But Rickey pressed on.

Toward the end of the 1947 season, as the Dodgers surged for the pennant, Dixie Walker said, “No other player on this club with the possible exception of Bruce Walker has done more to put the Dodgers up in the race than Robinson has. He is everything Branch Rickey said he was when he came up from Montreal.” Apologetic, Walker went to Rickey and told him that he no longer wished to be traded from the Dodgers. It was too late. In one of the best trades the master trader ever made, Walker was sent to Pittsburgh along with pitcher Hal Gregg for left-hander Preacher Roe and third baseman Billy Cox.

Elwin Charles Roe had won just four of nineteen decisions for the Pirates in 947. Over the next six years as a member of the Dodgers Roe won ninety games and lost just thirty-three. Cox played third base for the Dodgers from 1948 to 1954· A skinny, sad-looking man, “he looked like a plucked chicken when he stripped down,” recalls former Brooklyn Dodger publicist Irving Rudd. “It amazed everyone that he could find all that power to put on his throws when he went into the hole.” Cox was perhaps the best-fielding third baseman of his time and an important ingredient in the winning ways of the Dodgers.

Throughout the 1947 season, Rickey insisted that Robinson be evaluated simply on his merits as a ballplayer. Hungry for data, for quotes, for new insights, reporters trailed after Robinson and his wife and child. “The way things are now,” Rickey snapped at a press conference, “Robinson is a sideshow. Give him a chance. If I had my way about it, I would place a cordon of police protection around him so that he could be a ballplayer.” “Mr. Rickey was paternal without being paternalistic,” Rachel Robinson remembers.

The Dodgers received a tremendous amount of mail. Each one of the letters regarding Robinson was answered. There were many that were vile, disgusting tirades against Rickey and Robinson. These were answered in polite but firm language. Those who wrote negative letters and those who sent complimentary ones were all thanked for taking the time to write.

Hundreds of organizations clamored for a piece of Jackie Robinson, who was voted runner-up to Bing Crosby as the most popular man in America. There were more than five thousand social and commercial requests for personal appearances. Othel;’ groups beseeched Rickey to allow Robinson to work with them to help eliminate racial prejudice. Rickey’s answer to all these requests was always a firm no. He was determined that the “noble experiment” not be commercialized, politicized, or overdramatized.

There was one instance when Rickey lifted his ban on personal appearances. A twelve-year-old boy named Eddie Hamlin had mistakenly tossed gasoline on a bonfire at a skating rink and was burned severely from head to foot. The boy came from a poor family who was unable to meet hospital expenses. The boy’s idol was Jackie Robinson. Hospital authorities contacted the Dodgers. The youth, struggling to survive, would, they hoped, receive inspiration from a visit by the player he idolized.

Robinson came to the hospital and met with Eddie and gave him an autographed baseball and a pep talk. The visit was kept secret from the press; most of the hospital staff was not even aware of it. A few months after the visit, Eddie Hamlin was discharged from the hospital and headed toward complete recovery. The story of Jackie’s visit to a burned boy would have made excellent news copy. But Rickey stood firm. “Judgment of Robinson was to be made by what he did on the baseball diamond and in no other way.”

There was another hospital visit that could have produced much favorable publicity for Rickey and Durocher, but again the former Ohio schoolteacher felt the deed should be its own reward.

After the war ended, there were many vetuans suffering from tuberculosis who were lodged in hospitals and rest homes. At that time, tuberculosis generally required removal to a sanitorium for rest. Publicist Irving Rudd used to invite sports people to visit the veterans to boost morale. Rudd asked Branch Rickey and Leo Durocher to accompany him to a hospital in Castle Point, near Beacon, New York. “They both agreed,” Rudd recalls, ‘’but they both insisted there be no press, no publicity. Leo was under suspension or had just come off it. He could have used some good press, but he insisted he wouldn’t go if there was any press. The normal way we went on those visits was by station wagon. Rickey told me to meet him at Two fifteen Montague Street. We went up by chauffeured limousine. Nobody got paid a dime. I used to do it, and the other sports people did it because they cared.

“There were a couple of hundred men in a plain big room, no fancy auditorium with spotlights. Rickey began his talk in his gravelly voice. ‘You know, men, I am one of you.’ And then he went into a long story about being struck down with tuberculosis. He told the whole story, his primitive treatment, his long convalescence. He really related to them. ‘I was there,’ he barked. ‘You men have to follow the instructions of your doctors and nurses.’ Geez, it was a hushed time, this gravelly, big-browed guy talking to these guys in their own language. In those days tuberculosis was a rough thing, but he was giving them hope, a lot of hope. And he stunned everybody in the room, for it was the first time we had known about him and TB. He and Durocher were there for about three hours, and the evening ended with all of them talking baseball and giving out autographs.”

There were those who called him a man of conscience; others called him a charlatan. Rickey took the characterizations in his stride and kept on building. On March 6, 1948, he traded Eddie Stanky to the Boston Braves, clearing the way for Robinson to take over at second base. Pee Wee Reese always joked that during all the time he was with Brooklyn he never purchased a house. “I was afraid with Mr. Rickey around I would be traded.” On May 16, 1949, Bob Ramazzotti, “the new Pee Wee Reese,” was traded to the Cubs for $25,000 and Henry Schenz.

Rickey signed Sam Jethroe, who had tried out with Robinson at the Fenway Park charade. Installed at Montreal, he stole eighty-nine bases in 1949. But in 1950 Rickey sold Jethroe to the Boston Braves for $100,000. “It was the first time in my life where I sold a man who may be better than what I have,” the busy trader said. “I may have impoverished myself. But it seemed to me the move was necessary. I could not satisfy myself that, good as he is, he would make the ball club more likely to win another pennant. And by selling Jethroe to the Braves, I brought another Negro into the major-league baseball field.” Jethroe came up to the majors as a twenty-eight-year-old rookie and lasted but four seasons.

Breaking baseball’s color line enabled Branch Rickey to tap into a gold mine, but he elected not to monopolize the rich lode of talent in the Negro Leagues. Four players he did sign who became rookies of the year were Jackie Robinson (1947), Don Newcombe (1949), Joe Black (1952), and Junior Gilliam (1953). But there were others he passed up.

Monte Irvin could have been a Brooklyn Dodger. Larry Doby could have been a Brooklyn Dodger. Sam Jethroe could have been a Brooklyn Dodger. “Mr. Rickey wanted to spread the black players around,” Mal Goode believes. “He saw his job to convince the other owners to integrate baseball. It took a long, long time.” Installed as a special-assignment Dodger scout after the 1946 season to recommend other black prospects, Roy Campanella touted Irvin and Doby. “The Cleveland Indians are interested in Doby,” Campanella remembers Rickey’s explaining. “It is my fervent hope that every club in baseball sign a colored player.” Cleveland signed Doby, who became the first black player in the American League.

Irvin was signed by Fresco Thompson of the Dodgers in the winter of 1946 in Puerto Rico. Mrs. Manley, owner of the Newark Eagles, Irvin’s team, threatened legal action unless Rickey paid $5,000 for Irvin. It was a nominal price for the talented ballplayer, but “rather than get into any kind of hassle,” recalls Irvin, “Mr. Rickey contacted Horace Stoneham and recommended that he sign me.” And that was how Monte Irvin became aNew York Giant.

“Mr. Rickey was basically a Christian man,” notes Goode. “And he firmly believed the treatment of the black man was a blot on the history of America. We’d talk and walk about his lawn, and he’d wear that little straw hat of his. ‘I can’t do something about racial bigotry in every field,’ he told me, ‘but I can certainly do something about it in the field of baseball.’”

There were times when even Rickey’s reserve broke. One day in early spring he called Dr. Dodson. “’I sometimes wish I had never gotten into this business of attempting to break the color line in baseball,’” he told Dodson, “ ‘but I wonder if you and Dr. [John] Johnson of the Unity Committee can spare a day and fly down with me to Newport News to meet Jackie and Rachel.”

“When Mr. Rickey got aboard the plane he told me he had sent a contract to Jackie with the figure Jackie had earned the year before as a starting point,” recalls Dodson. “‘Jackie snorted,’ Mr. Rickey explained. ‘He sent it back unsigned with some very unkind words. He’s carried away by all the publicity and does not have his mind on baseball. He’s been wined and dined across the country as a great hero. He’s made the lard circuit. Because he’s come into baseball late, Jackie wants to make his million quick because his playing years are short. I told him that he could make his million in three or four years if he concentrated on baseball and that he would also be a contributor to race relations, but the way he’s doing it, it spelled disaster.

“‘He’s tremendously overweight and involved in too many things to be totally concerned with baseball. I gave him the initial figure as a basis to start negotiations as I had always done with other players, but he has me over a barrel. The publicity and position he has make it possible for him to demand almost any salary he desires, but I don’t expect to be exploited in any way. I want you to meet with Jackie and Rachel.’”

Dodson and Johnson obliged Rickey. “Jackie and Rachel were upset to begin at a salary in the second year that Jackie had ended with in the first yeat, but when we explained that it was just a starting point they were quite willing to sit down with Mr. Rickey. They all came to agreement that afternoon on the salary, but the problem as Mr. Rickey had suspected was far from solved. Jackie was some forty pounds overweight and terribly out of shape. One member of the Dodger organization said Jackie was ‘nigger rich’—that he could not stand prosperity.”

The Dodgers held spring training in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic in 1948, largely because Rickey had received a $so,000 guarantee from President Trujillo. Now reinstalled as Dodger manager, Leo Durocher came face to face with, in his phrase, “a fat-assed Robinson who looked like a blimp.”

Robinson had lost some of the weight after the DodsonJohnson meeting, but was still twenty-five pounds overweight. Durocher thought Robinson had sabotaged him. As Rickey once said of Durocher, “Leo is far from perfect. His judgment in handling different personalities is his biggest weakness.” “The Lip” treated Robinson like a rookie, pushing him through punishing drills and exercises, ridiculing him in front of the press. Those long hot days in the Dominican Republic planted the seeds for enduring animosity between the two strong-willed men.

The 1948 season began badly for the Dodgers. Robinson was still shedding pounds, still fighting to get into shape. Campanella, the heir apparent at catcher, had been sent down to break the color line at St. Paul in the American Association. Bruce Edwards, the incumbent catcher, was hampered by a sore arm. Pressure grew to replace Durocher. The Dodgers lost one game 13-12, and Durocher was ejected from the contest. The ejection further strained relations between Durocher and Rickey, and between Durocher and Robinson.

Actress Laraine Day remembered the beginning of the end for her husband Durocher as Dodger manager. “I’ve just had a call from Rickey,” srud Leo. “He wants me to resign. I won’t resign. He’ll have to fire me.”