Rickey & Robinson (2 page)

The response was silence. After a bit, Ralph telephoned the Dodger offices. Rickey would not take his call. When the 1946 Dodgers assembled for spring training in Florida, Branca still had heard nothing. Further, he was not invited to the camp. He borrowed money from his brother and drove a battered car to Vero Beach. There, alone and unhappy, he checked into a motel he recalls as being both ugly and dirty. “I was worried,” he says, “that my big-league career might be over before it really began.”

Following two weeks of increasingly frantic telephone calls—the borrowed money was running out—Ralph reached a secretary, who said, “Mr. Rickey will see you at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

When Branca appeared, Rickey produced the $3,500 contract. “Sign this immediately,” he ordered.

Branca did. “You may now check with the equipment man about your uniform,” Rickey said. He paused and fixed Branca with a gelid stare. “And Branca, one more thing. Don’t you ever hold out on me again!”

For the record, Branca, at $67 a week, went out and won 21 games for the Dodgers in 1947, when he was 21 years old. But he seldom seemed happy as a ballplayer, and a few years after Branca threw the notorious home run ball to Bobby Thomson, his career tanked and he went into the insurance business. Before reaching his 30th birthday, Branca, the pitcher, was finished. He had the good sense and good fortune to marry a wealthy woman, but even half a century later, when I see Branca, I sense a man with a battered and unrecovered psyche.

Would a gentler, less parsimonious Branch Rickey have given the large, sensitive Branca the confidence he lacked? Would a confident Branca then have gone on from his 20-game season and etched out a career that brought him into the Baseball Hall of Fame—not as a sometime guest, but as a member?

Perhaps.

“The love of money,” St. Paul wrote in an epistle to his disciple, Timothy, “is the root of all evil.” Not, as in the common misinterpretation, money, but the love of it—the sheer, unbridled, salivating lust for lucre—is what Paul insisted causes disaster. Few have read the King James version of the Bible as studiously as the devoutly Methodist Branch Rickey. Few, considering cupidity, have paid the words of St. Paul so little heed.

When Rickey was signing star athletes out of the Negro Leagues—Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe followed soon after Robinson—he refused to pay Negro League owners for their contracts. These owners, Rickey maintained, setting an unofficial record for sporting rationalization, were shady characters. Therefore they did not deserve to be paid.

But compared to Rickey’s greatest accomplishment, integration, parsimony becomes a minor shortcoming. Under close scrutiny no figure remains flawless. Even as Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he kept slaves. While Abraham Lincoln was composing the Emancipation Proclamation, his family finances were in shambles. “No man,” Montaigne supposedly has written, “is a hero to his valet.”

Nor is any man necessarily a hero to his wallet.

In Rickey’s halcyon years, running the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers, he demanded and got a percentage of receipts from the sale of ballplayers’ contracts to other major-league clubs. The costs of developing baseball players—paying managers and coaches, building and maintaining fields, buying uniforms, bats, baseballs,
clubhouse hamburgers and all the rest—were paid by the organization at large. (Professional ballplayers must purchase only their spikes—now cleats—and gloves, although some finesse these costs with endorsement deals.) Presiding with care and penury, Rickey supervised expenditures from an executive suite, and often did hands-on coaching and evaluating around home plate. Or even in his office.

Carl Erskine, late of the Dodgers, who set a World Series record by striking out 14 Yankees on a cool October afternoon in 1953, remembers one of Rickey’s unique tests. He directed a pitcher to hold a baseball with his palm inward, facing his nose. Now bend the elbow as deeply inward as possible until the ball touches the shoulder. From that position throw the baseball as far as you can. (That will not be a very great distance.) “Mr. Rickey,” Erskine says, “could tell from that little toss just what kind of an overhand curve a pitcher would have.” Mister Erskine’s overhand curve was good enough for him to throw two no-hitters during a relatively brief but glorious Dodger career, mostly as a teammate of Robinson.

Rickey justified his percentage of player sales as fair compensation for his expertise. But the unusual arrangement raised at least one troubling question. Wasn’t it tempting for Rickey to sign more young ballplayers than his own major-league team could possibly use? Surplus athletes would mean more player sales and more cash in Rickey’s personal percentage piggy bank. Rickey never acknowledged that this issue might represent a conflict of interest. When he died in 1965, he left an estate of roughly $1.5 million. It would have been considerably greater had his personal avarice not antagonized other executives. Sam Breadon, the Cardinals’ president, who forced Rickey out of St. Louis in 1943, subsequently sold the team for $4 million. After Walter Francis O’Malley, Rickey’s fierce Brooklyn rival, died at the Mayo Clinic in 1979, the O’Malley estate amounted to an estimated $350 million. Baseball is a game for small boys and flinty businessmen.

Rickey’s covetous acquisition of young talent became so extreme
that Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball from 1921 until his death in 1944, released 91 St. Louis Cardinal farmhands in March 1938. That is to say, Landis overruled what was then baseball’s prime directive, the reserve clause, and made these young players free agents, suddenly able to sell their services to the highest bidder. This was a revolutionary act, coming as it did during baseball’s feudal years. The total number of players “Czar” Landis released was more than enough to stock four full teams. Landis’s decree cost the Cards a lot of talent and might well have been a deathblow for Rickey’s baseball career, seven years before Rickey signed Jackie Robinson.

But Rickey survived. He was not only eloquent, but shrewd and tough. Besides, his great idea, the baseball farm system, worked. It worked so well that it became the wave of the future. Fighting against it—an idea whose time had come—Landis learned what Nicholas II of Russia discovered earlier when he went up against Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Even the power of a czar has limitations.

In the pattern of a Rickey farm system, the major-league team controlled scores of minor-league rosters through what were then called working agreements and are now known as PDCs, player development contracts. Essentially, ballplayers throughout the minor leagues function under contracts that are owned or controlled by teams in the major leagues. A major-league “farm director” distributes talent among the big club’s affiliated minor-league franchises, which are classified from Triple A (the best) down to rookie leagues. The bigleague team pays the players’ salaries and may also pick up other expenses for the minor-league operation, such as the cost of bats and balls and chartered buses. The players advance, or are released, entirely at the discretion of the big-league team. The minor-league club owner runs ticket sales, plans promotions and determines the price of ballpark beer. Although his title is team president, he is in effect a combination doorman and barkeep. He is not allowed to make baseball decisions. The “independent” minor-league team, locally
owned and locally controlled, was formerly a staple of organized baseball. It is now largely an anachronism.

Joe DiMaggio, a Bay Area youngster, broke in with the locally owned and controlled San Francisco Seals. Pee Wee Reese, a Kentucky native, first signed with the Louisville Colonels. Both minor-league teams eventually sold the contracts of these young stars for a significant profit. But that is not how things work today, in post-Rickey baseball. The actual talent in the minor leagues, the players—without whom, of course, there could be no games—are chattels of big-league teams, usually located a long way off. Some Massachusetts natives start playing pro ball in Oregon. Some Texans break in with teams in the Dakotas. “Our principal focus,” one farm director tells me, “is not where the athlete comes from. In fact he may do better away from the pressures of his family and his hometown. Our focus is on consistency of instruction, creating, so to speak, a uniform product.” I wonder if the McDonald’s Corporation got the idea of franchising its uniform hamburger salons from the baseball world invented by Branch Rickey.

Curiously, or not so curiously, there was no hint of future integration in the Rickey farm system. His players were white, his managers were white, his coaches were white, and his scouts were white. If Rickey felt—he says he did—that a time for change was coming, he kept that to himself. Debates about the farm system were creating all the controversy he could tolerate.

In 1939 Rickey’s St. Louis Cardinals had agreements with no fewer than 33 minor-league clubs. The Cardinals organization, which owned the baseball franchises in Rochester, Columbus and Houston, was an empire unto itself. One does best to think in terms of colonialism. In ordering the release of the 91 minor leaguers, Landis, who pined for fully empowered local ownership, provided what turned out to be only a hiccup in Rickey’s grand career. (But among the players Landis liberated was the implausibly gifted Harold Patrick “Pistol Pete” Reiser, who helped the Brooklyn Dodgers beat Rickey’s
Cardinals out of the 1941 National League pennant. As a 22-year-old Brooklyn rookie, Reiser batted .341, which led the league.)

For several years before 1939, Landis and his staff had been digging into the working agreements Rickey negotiated with a number of minor-league teams: Cedar Rapids of the Western League, Springfield of the Western Association, Crookston of the Northern League and Fayetteville in the Arkansas-Missouri League, among others. At length, when Landis reviewed the findings, he was appalled. The so-called working agreements, the commissioner told reporters in Chicago, “are being manipulated into arrangements for complete control of the lower classification clubs through secret understandings.” Rickey himself saw nothing wrong with having a working agreement with two teams in the same league. Landis maintained that this sort of thing affected pennant races. The parent club, the Cardinals, could load one team with talent at the expense of another. Why might this happen? The parent club’s first interest was in developing players, not in minor-league pennant races. You might want to stress speed on one club, strong-armed pitching on another or perhaps speed and pitching together. Landis, a lawyer and a former federal judge, decreed that “no [minor-league] club should contract away its right and obligation to get competitive playing strength as needed and whenever obtainable.” In simple English: Play to Win.

Although Landis was an autocrat, he believed that minor-league club owners should be in complete control of their teams. Rickey, Landis charged, was “perverting working agreements with minor-league clubs so that he exercised complete control of various minor leagues.”

Matters came to a head in 1939 during a hearing at Landis’s office in Chicago. “You have agreements with two teams, Danville and Springfield, in the Three-I League so that you, in St. Louis, can influence the Three-I League pennant race,” Landis told Rickey. Landis lowered his pointed chin and glowered. “The agreements are big as a house, aren’t they?”

Rickey: “No, sir. Not as big as a house.”

Landis: “They are as big as the universe.”

Landis proceeded to lecture Rickey toward the point that pennant races in the Three-I League were “just as important as races in the National and American Leagues.” Rickey’s farm system, a baseball octopus, was strangling minor-league competition, Landis warned.

Despite Landis’s threatening manner, Rickey continued developing his farm system, but now he became careful to work with only one minor-league team per league. Across the 1930s and 1940s as many as 59 minor leagues came to exist in America, from San Diego up through Maine, and Rickey’s farm system and bank accounts flourished. Landis did not again intercede. “The general feeling in baseball back then,” wrote J. G. Taylor Spink in an authoritative biography,
Judge Landis and Twenty-Five Years of Baseball
, “was that farm systems were here to stay and the Judge had simply cleared the air, promoting competitive pennant races throughout organized baseball.”

Privately, Landis referred to Rickey as “that sanctimonious son of a bitch,” and “that Protestant bastard masquerading in a minister’s robe.” I can neither find nor recall instances where Rickey spoke critically of Landis. It would have been destructive and pointless to badmouth baseball’s historic czar.

In a decision handed down in 1922, the US Supreme Court issued a classic ruling. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. exempted organized baseball from antitrust laws and standard government business regulations, maintaining that baseball was “first and foremost, a sport and not a business.” I played fast-pitch softball for many years alongside a shortstop named Charles “Cy” Rembar, who after-hours made a fortune practicing constitutional law. Rembar, a student of American legal history, wrote an authoritative book called
The Law of the Land
. Holmes’s 1922 baseball ruling, Cy Rembar told me, was “the worst decision any great Supreme Court justice ever made.”

In essence Holmes said that organized baseball could run itself any way it pleased. No minimum wage laws. No mandatory recognition of unions. No humane treatment of employees. No fair play to athletes. No fair employment. The men who ruled baseball were free to do anything they pleased, up to if not including assault and battery.

Rickey is hailed, and rightly so, for signing Jackie Robinson. But a hard-eyed look shows us also a Rickey who, more than anyone else, perpetuated baseball feudalism. Of course, contradictions in great leaders are not unusual, but seldom are they so dramatic. Branch Rickey, the Great Emancipator, was also a practicing feudal lord.

Aside from Landis, the baseball establishment generally came to accept the farm system as an efficient way of doing business. Quite simply, it worked. Only sportswriters made protest. Some called the farm systems “chain gangs,” and one columnist, Jimmy Powers of the New York
Daily News
, almost drove Rickey out of baseball in 1950. Powers was a resolute reactionary and a closet anti-Semite—in short an unappetizing character—but he championed the salary rights of individual ballplayers with enduring passion. His ferocious clashes with Rickey came later, when Rickey was presiding over the Brooklyn Dodgers. These seemed to blind Powers to the nobility of Rickey’s highest calling: integration. Thus Rickey’s crusade in Brooklyn proceeded without the support of New York’s most popular newspaper. For its part, the
New York Times
seemed embarrassed by the whole thing.