“Branch, [if you integrate the National League] all hell will break loose.”
“No, Lowell, all heaven will rejoice.”
—Quoted in SAM ROBERTS, “Faster than Jackie Robinson”
Mr. Rickey was a Christian Man. He firmly believed that the treatment of the black man was a blot on the history of America.
—MAL GOODE, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, 1955
This book backs into the treatment of beginning integration in modern-day baseball, especially the nearly forgotten Larry Doby half of it. It does so by treating first with the Wizards of Oz, the two gentlemen behind the curtain (well, not really far behind the curtain), Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck. Well-known to baseball historians, Rickey, Veeck, and their stories represent a necessary prelude to any story about the first African Americans in the major leagues.
Branch Rickey’s office at 215 Montague Street in Brooklyn (today a Toronto Dominion bank), his lair when he was president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was affectionately known as “the cave of the winds.”1 While there, as well as elsewhere, Rickey is said to have delivered every prologue or pronouncement as if he were “delivering the Gettysburg Address.”2 “He was a man of many faucets, all running at once,” said a Brooklyn fan.3 Enos “Country” Slaughter, a Hall of Fame player for Rickey, groused, “[Rickey] was always going to the vault for a nickel’s change.” 4 Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis called Rickey a “hypocritical Protestant bastard wrapped in minister’s robes.”5 Rickey displayed “streaks of petulance, moralism and autocracy that either infuriated or endeared him to those he encountered.”6
These quotations show but a few of the many sides of Wesley Branch Rickey, the highest, or among the very highest, paid persons in baseball, player or manager, from 1916 until his retirement in 1959. Even back in 1927, Rickey’s five-year contract with the Cardinals provided him with a yearly base salary of $65,000 plus 10 percent commission on player sales, later raised to a $75,000 base, topping what already was the highest salary in all of baseball.7 Accordingly, for instance, with commissions, Rickey made $95,000 in 1928 ($5.4 million in today’s dollars), while players earned $3,500–$4,500 per year ($149,000–$243,000 today).8 Even as late as 1951, Mickey Mantle earned just $7,000 with the New York Yankees; in 1951 the Major League rookie minimum was $6,000.9 Rickey is, of course, best known as the man who cultivated Jackie Robinson as a baseball player, brought him into organized (white) baseball in 1946, and with Robinson integrated the Brooklyn Dodgers and the major leagues in 1947. This chapter explores but a few of those Rickey sides, perhaps the less known ones, for numerous biographies record and evaluate Rickey’s career in depth.10 This chapter’s biographical section thus will be brief, a thumbnail sketch. But, first, let us delve into a less discussed aspect of Branch Rickey’s long career in baseball.
Younger baseball fans know Kiner as the color commentator on New York Mets broadcasts and for his postgame show, Kiner’s Korner, for decades broadcast on New York television and radio. More perceptive fans remember Kiner for his malapropisms, especially the ones mangling sponsors’ names: “Manufacturers Hangover” for Manufactures Hanover, or “American Cyanide” for American Cyanamid.11 The affection New York fans had for Kiner, however, overrode any offense he might have given sponsors, unlike one predecessor New York baseball announcer who referred to sponsor Proctor & Gamble’s product (Ivory Soap) as “Ovary Soap” and was sacked forthwith.12
Kiner, who died in early 2014, was elected to the Hall of Fame in his fifteenth, and last, year of eligibility. The election took a number of years perhaps because although Kiner had a brilliant baseball career, it was a short one, limited to ten years as a player. In that time he won the National League home run championship seven consecutive years, a record that still stands, and was a six time All-Star. He was the player in baseball history to reach the two-hundred-home-run plateau earliest in his big league career.
Kiner was popular with teammates and fans alike. He had little or no ego. He served as advisor, mentor, and counselor to younger players. Fans delighted in the towering home runs Kiner hit to left field. He was approachable to fans, but he also had star quality. He dated movie stars, including Elizabeth Taylor (well, just one date, but there were other Hollywood stars as well).
Kiner, though, faced two drawbacks. First, he played for the hapless Pittsburgh Pirates, who in Kiner’s last year with them, 1952, lost a record 112 of 154 games. Second, he played for Branch Rickey, whose Ohio Wesleyan classmate John Galbreath had been a successful real-estate developer in Columbus, Ohio; who owned the Pirates (as well as Darby Dan Farms, breeder of several Kentucky Derby winning racehorses); and who had brought Rickey in as the Pirates’ chief executive after Walter O’Malley had eased Rickey out as president of the Brooklyn Dodgers after the 1950 season.
Following the 1952 season, a year in which Kiner had again captured the home run crown, Rickey traded him to the Chicago Cubs for six forgettable players (no more than “six jockstraps” according to Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince).13 “We finished last with you and we can finish last without you,” Rickey told Kiner.14
But Kiner was the most popular Pirate, whose presence sold tickets. According to Pirate teammates at the time, such as Vernon Law, Bob Friend, and Dick Groat, after Kiner’s last at bat, the stands emptied, no matter whether the Pirates were winning or losing, no matter whether the game was close or a runaway. Kiner, though, and largely Kiner alone, had brought them in through the front door.
So why did Rickey trade Kiner away? Because in addition to six no-name players, the Pirates also received $150,000 ($2.3 million today), of which Rickey took a hefty portion. From his earliest days with the St. Louis Cardinals, to his last days with the Pirates, with the Dodgers in between, Rickey’s contracts always provided that he would personally receive a portion of the profit made on any player traded. So, in addition to a $55,000 or $65,000 annual salary, which was lowered only during the war years (to $40,000), Rickey made a healthy addition to his contract salary by peddling baseball flesh.15
Rickey always bragged of himself as a supreme judge of baseball talent. A principal plank in his platform was that it was far better to have traded a player a year early than a year too late.16 At the latter point, the player would have lost a major portion of his market value. One of Rickey’s sayings, of which he had a multitude, was “Never trust a guy with a bad ankle, knee or arm. The day you need them, something will go wrong.” Rickey “could look at a player and in an instant know if he was a half-step slower . . . if he couldn’t pull to his power the way he did the year before.”17
But why cash? And why did Rickey trade away so many stars, whose presence on the field greatly bulked up the gate, like Ralph Kiner, Dizzy Dean, Rip Collins, Johnny Mize, Ducky Medwick (twice), and countless other stars, all of whom could be expected to add significantly to attendance?
A few Rickey watchers among players and at least one among sportswriters made this criticism, that Rickey churned players so that he could line his pockets with cash received, but no one particularly seems to have highlighted it. Further, no one seems to have noted the irony that the man most responsible for beginning the integration of Major League Baseball consistently made money for himself by selling baseball players.
Baseball historians write about many of Branch Rickey’s attributes but two stand out. First, of course, is his role in integrating baseball and the methodical way in which he went about that. Second is his development, first in the 1920s at St. Louis, and then at Brooklyn, of the first Minor League farms systems, which had been unknown until Rickey developed the first and were sometimes referred to derisively as “Rickey’s chain gang.”18 By the early 1920s, Rickey and the Cardinals had seven hundred players under contract to St. Louis.19
The inference that arises, though, is that Rickey developed farm clubs not only to feed talent to the Major League club. Another motivation may well have been to provide him with additional raw material for his player sales operation (except for one or two occasions, Rickey never seems to have outlaid cash for the purchase of a player, only to sell them).20
Rickey’s trades included the following:
• Traded Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean in 1938, from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Chicago Cubs for three faceless players and $185,000 cash ($8.07 million today). Dean had pitched over three hundred innings per year for the Cardinals. He had won thirty, losing only seven, with a 2.66 ERA, in 1934.21 Rickey gave as an excuse that the Deans (pitchers Dizzy and Paul) complained constantly about their salaries. Ever colorful, when holding out in 1936 Dizzy had said, “I am lopsided on one shoulder from that wheel, and the grindstone has my nose as flat as a policeman’s foot.”22
• Traded Joe “Ducky” Medwick, a star of the Gashouse Gang, from the Cardinals to the Dodgers for three players and $125,000 ($5.45 million) in 1939. In 1941, after being traded, Medwick hit .318, with 18 HR and 88 RBIs, for the Dodgers. When, in late 1942, Rickey arrived in Brooklyn, he traded Medwick again, to the New York Giants, again, for no-name players and cash.
• Sold pitcher Paul “the Dude” Derringer from the Cardinals to the Cincinnati Reds, ostensibly because Rickey did not approve of Derringer’s playboy lifestyle. Rickey got the ultimate playboy of the time, shortstop Leo “The Lip” Durocher, in return. Rickey and the Cardinals received a generous cash payment as well ($75,000, or $4.75 million in today’s terms).23 Derringer went on to be a twenty-game winner for the Reds.
• In 1941 sold Hall of Fame first baseman Johnny Mize to the Giants for $50,000 ($1.89 million) and several journeymen players. Rickey opined that Mize was too slow and past his prime. The truth was that Mize had hired an agent to negotiate his salary, a rarity in those days, which Rickey attempted to stanch. In 1942 for the Giants, Mize hit twenty-six home runs, second in the National League.24
• While at the Dodgers, sold MVP first baseman (1941) Dolph Camilli to the New York Giants for cash, claiming that Camilli was “no longer able to pull pitches over the 32-foot screen down Ebbets Field’s cozy 297-foot right-field line, and no longer demonstrate[ed] quick footwork around first base.”25 Brooklyn fans were outraged and carried “Rickey the Wrecker” and “Go Back to St. Louis, You Bum” signs outside Ebbets Field.26
• Traded Dodgers second baseman Billy Herman to the Boston Braves for $50,001 in 1946.
• Sold infielder Monte Basgall from the Dodgers to the Pirates for $50,001 ($901,000 today) in 1950.27
• At the Pirates, traded Murray Dickson to the Philadelphia Phillies for $80,000 cash in 1955.28
• At the Pirates, sold Daniel O’Connell to the Milwaukee Braves for six Minor League players and cash.29
Rickey presented a contrite facade to reporters and to the public with statements such as: “It wasn’t until after I sold Dolph Camilli . . . that I realized what an idol I had peddled down the river,” and “The Dizzy Dean deal broke my heart.”30 Words to the contrary, Rickey always continued his “players for cash” mode of operation alongside his receipt of one of the highest salaries in baseball. Rickey’s base salary with the Pirates was $100,000 for five years ($1.62 million today), with a share of the cash received on player sales and with the contractual assurance of a five-year $50,000-per-year consultancy following retirement from active management.31
The list of trades Rickey engineered, which seem invariably to have included a cash element, goes on and on, with the inescapable implication that, in addition to fattening the team’s treasury, Rickey was funding the add-on to his base salary. He even engineered a $100,000 finder’s fee for himself if the sale of the Cardinals from Sam Breadon to Oklahoma oilman Lewis Wentz had gone through, which ultimately it did not.32
At the time a few critics criticized Rickey for his selfish, or at least mixed, motives in player sales. Cardinals Johnny Mize and Enos Slaughter “believed that [Rickey] didn’t want to win pennants but only wanted to finish close enough to the top to draw fans and turn a profit.”33 Reporter Roy Stockton of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that “Rickey was ‘always looking for commissions on player deals, which clouded his judgment.’”34
No one seems to have homed in on the duplicity of Rickey selling baseball flesh while leading the fight to integrate Major League Baseball. Rickey’s biographer Lee Lowenfish calls Mize’s, Slaughter’s, and, by implication, Stockton’s beliefs “erroneous.” Yet Rickey’s player deals and receipt of cash represented a conflict of interest that caused him to serve his own personal interests rather than at all times the best interests of the baseball club for which he worked. Few modern boards of director would allow such a “side job” arrangement for one of its executives.35
Rickey’s side deal was not the first and would not be the last in the baseball world. Through some of their best years, the late 1940s and 1950s, the New York Yankees won twelve American League pennants in fifteen years. During that era the notoriously tightfisted George Weiss was the Yankees’ GM. In salary negotiations Weiss would include player’s World Series checks as part of their base salaries so that Weiss could argue that players already were well compensated and thus didn’t merit significant raises, or any raise at all. Then, too, after all, they were Yankees: a World Series paycheck was a routine, recurring item.
What players later discovered was that Weiss had cut a secret deal with Yankees’ ownership. Dan Topping and Del Webb would give Weiss a budget, say, $1 million for salaries that year. The secret agreement then was that Weiss could pocket 10 percent of the difference (the shortfall) of actual salaries (say, $600,000) from the budgeted amount. Weiss therefore used every artifice he could think of to keep player salaries down.36 The New York players hated George Weiss. They felt he was not only a hard bargainer but, after they learned of his side deal, that he also cheated them. Nonetheless, under Weiss and with his secret side deals, the Yankees kept winning.
Similarly, in Rickey’s twenty-one years with the St. Louis team, and during the period when Rickey sold away star player after star player, the Cardinals won nine National League pennants and, in that subset of years, won six of nine world championships.37 When Rickey assumed the reins at the Cardinals, a popular ditty about St. Louis was “first in booze, first in shoes, last in the major leagues.” Budweiser was a hit, but both the St. Louis Browns (later the Baltimore Orioles of the American League) and the St. Louis Cardinals were perennial cellar dwellers. Branch Rickey changed all of that, player sales or no player sales.
The preceding discussion may have taken some of bloom off the Branch Rickey rose. Now the task becomes to add it back on—remove the tarnish, so to speak (and mix metaphors as well), for Branch Rickey was a great man.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Major League owners cited many reasons for their resistance to integration. One was that the presence of black players on the field would attract African American baseball fans. In turn, the presence of the expected substantial number of black spectators in the stands would deter white fans from attending. Gate receipts would drop significantly, and in those pretelevision contract days, gate receipts were the principal source of cash for Major League Baseball clubs.
The 1946 Wrigley Report (authored by Larry McPhail of the Yankees, Sam Breadon of the Cardinals and Phil Wrigley of the Cubs), commissioned by the owners, also concluded that “black ball players might attract too many blacks to ballparks, threatening property values” as well as gate receipts.38
When Rickey brought Jackie Robinson into the big leagues, the criticism turned 180 degrees. Now the pundits, other team owners, and various other onlookers postulated that Rickey’s motive was to increase the number of fans in the stands and thus increase the gate receipts. Brooklyn was New York City’s largest borough, with a population of 2.5 million, including then as well as now, a substantial black population, which would have been lured to the ballpark by the presence of African American players.
Second-guessers also hypothesized several less noble and indeed nefarious motives behind Branch Rickey’s quest to integrate the major leagues. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack make the turnstiles click,” was the popular ditty describing Rickey’s motivation in integrating baseball as purely an economic, profit-seeking one.39 “Are you stupid enough not to understand that the Brooklyn club profited hugely because of what your Mr. Rickey did?” a mythical critic asked Jackie Robinson.40
Critics maintained that Rickey thought of blacks in baseball only after the wartime shortage of qualified players had become acute. At one point during World War II, the Minor League Newport News (VA) Pilots had fifteen players under eighteen years of age.41 In June 1944, desperate for players, the Major League Cincinnati Reds started pitcher Joe Nuxhall, at age fifteen the youngest big league player ever. In 1945 a one-legged player (Bert Shepard) pitched for the Washington Senators; a one-armed player (Pete Gray) patrolled the outfield for the St. Louis Browns (April 17–September 30, 1945).
In Brooklyn, when he first arrived there, Rickey faced a shortage of players not only because of the war but also because in Brooklyn he had no farm system like the one he had developed in St. Louis. Bringing black players such as Robinson on board was for Rickey a solution to the player-shortage problem, until such time as Rickey could develop a farm system. “[Rickey] maintained that the Brooklyn organization was faced with a bleak future unless radical innovations were put in place.”42
Rickey turned to blacks as candidates because he could get them cheap. He could and did obtain them cheap, although whether that was his motivation is a different question. Rickey did not pay the Negro League’s Kansas Monarchs anything when he signed Jackie Robinson to a contract with the Montreal Royals. The Monarch’s longtime owners, J. L. Wilkinson and Thomas Baird, raised a stink about it, to no avail.43 Rickey insisted, “There is no Negro league, as far as I am concerned.” 44 He took advantage of the anomaly that, for the most part, Negro League teams paid players month to month. Because the players had no contracts, Rickey could scout, tamper with, and sign them, or so he felt.45
Soon after Rickey had signed Robinson, he raided the Baltimore Elite Giants to sign future Hall of Famer Roy Campanella and the Newark Eagles to obtain future Hall of Fame pitcher Don Newcombe. The “most singular and outspoken of the Negro League owners, Effa Manley of the Newark Eagles, a white woman who chose to pass for black,” constantly expressed outrage at Rickey and what in her view were outright thefts. By contrast, when Bill Veeck acquired Larry Doby from the Newark Eagles, Veeck and the Cleveland Indians paid Manley $15,000 ($10,000 plus a $5,000 earn out; $10,000 in some accounts) if Doby stuck with the big league club for thirty days.46 The hard-drinking, fiery Larry McPhail, general manager of the New York Yankees (and Rickey’s predecessor with the Brooklyn Dodgers), contended that Rickey destroyed the Negro Leagues, in part by taking players without compensation.47
Rickey himself stated, “Putting colored players in the major leagues will accomplish something that is long overdue. It is something I have thought about and believed for a long time.” 48 Based on not only his Methodist upbringing but also his lifelong religious fervor, Branch Rickey had a powerful social conscience. As early as January 1943, when addressing the membership of the New York Athletic Club, Rickey opened the door by opining that “mass scouting might possibly come up with a black player or two.” 49 About the same time, Rickey consulted with George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company and trustee for the heirs of Charles Ebbets and Edward McKeever, who all together owned two-thirds of the Dodgers’ stock. McLaughlin replied to Rickey: “Go ahead. You might turn up something.”50
As did most other Americans, Rickey read about the 1943 race riots and smoldering racial tensions in Harlem, Detroit, Beaumont Texas, and Tulsa.51 He sensed the irony in blacks serving and dying for their country in the war were not permitted to enter Major League baseball after they returned home.
Rickey also always recounted the story of a wrong that he had long before witnessed and always wanted to right. As a young player-coach at his alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan, in 1904 Rickey had one black player on the baseball team, Charles “Tommy” Thomas, from Zanesville, Ohio. Thomas converted from outfielder to catcher after Rickey, a catcher, had been ruled ineligible because Rickey had turned professional to play football. Fans, students, and opposing teams subjected Thomas to verbal abuse at many of the campuses the Ohio Wesleyan Battling Bishops visited. At the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, a loudmouthed fan yelled, “Get the n—r off the field.” In Morgantown, at the University of West Virginia, fans hurled racial slurs at Thomas.
The apotheosis came when Rickey and his team traveled to South Bend, Indiana, to play baseball against the University of Notre Dame. The South Bend hotel clerk refused to allow Thomas to register with the rest of the OWU team and obtain a room. Rickey managed to sneak Thomas into the hotel; Thomas was to sleep on a cot in Rickey’s room. Once in the room, Thomas broke down sobbing, rubbing at this skin as if “to forcibly remove the stain of its color.” “I never felt so helpless in my life,” Rickey recalled. Though the incident occurred long before social justice had become an issue for many, “Rickey instinctively empathized with Thomas’s pain of rejection.”52 Rickey and Thomas maintained a lifelong friendship even though Thomas, who had become a dentist, practiced in faraway New Mexico.53
Another of the many formative incidents, and a prophetic one, in Rickey’s life occurred in February 1938, when Rickey attended the United Methodist Council in Chicago, Illinois.54 There he met and discussed race and baseball with Karl Everette Downs, originally a Methodist pastor from Pasadena, California, and later the president of Sam Houston College, a small, predominantly black, Methodist school in Austin Texas. Ordinarily, the episode would be unremarkable, two scions of John Wesley’s church sharing “the warming of the heart” Methodism and its practices were said to instill. But Karl Everette Downs was pastor and friend to Jackie Roosevelt Robinson, who was then and remained a lifelong Methodist. Robinson credited Downs with helping him “disassociate from the gang” and turn to the Methodist church, religion, and athletics, noting, “[Downs was a] man who influenced me powerfully.”55 Robinson would have been nineteen then, beginning to attract attention throughout Southern California because of his athletic exploits. It is the first known connection of Jackie Robinson with Branch Rickey.
If Branch Rickey believed so staunchly in racial equality, why did he not attempt to integrate baseball earlier? After all, the Thomas incident occurred in 1904; Rickey did not begin the process of integration until 1946–47, forty-two years later.
The answer to that question lies in St. Louis. Until Major League Baseball’s westward expansion in 1958 (Dodgers to Los Angeles, Giants to San Francisco), St. Louis was the westernmost Major League team. St. Louis clubs, especially the Cardinals, drew fans from a geographical area dwarfing that of any other team, butting up against Cincinnati Reds country in western Kentucky and Tennessee, and including all of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and more. Back then those areas, or certain of them, were bastions of racial prejudice and discrimination against blacks.
St. Louis was and remains a southern city, or at least it has a decidedly southern flavor to it. The Dred Scott case, Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held a slave not to be a citizen and therefore lacking standing to sue for freedom that rightfully was his, occurred in St. Louis and was in part a cause of the Civil War. Until 1944 St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park, where both the Browns and the Cardinals played, segregated black and white fans, using chicken wire to relegate black baseball fans to distant and inferior seats.56 Given the lay of the land in those years, it would have seemed to anyone who gave thought to it that beginning integration in St. Louis in the 1930s was not only a herculean but also a suicidal task.
World War II then intervened. Rickey moved on from St. Louis to Brooklyn, which he deemed more hospitable to what he intended to do. Even before the war ended, he began to lay plans for what he and Jackie Robinson would undertake.
What was Rickey’s motivation? Was it to field a winning team and make money for himself and for the Dodgers? Was it to right wrongs that had smoldered in Rickey’s conscience? Was it quickly to make up for the war-induced player shortage? Did the ever-frugal Rickey act because he knew that he could get talented black players on the cheap? Or did it emanate from moral and religious convictions Rickey held?
One answer, with which many but not all would agree, is that Rickey’s primary motive was a deeply held sense of social justice, a firm belief that “we are all God’s children.” An easier answer is that it does not make any difference. According to Hall of Fame player Monte Irvin, “regardless of the motives, Mr. Rickey had the conviction to pursue it and to follow through.”57 He had the conviction, and he had the courage. “It took Branch Rickey to come up with the answers, to follow through.”58
Rickey was born on a farm in southern Ohio on December 20, 1881. The nearest big town was Portsmouth, situated on the north bank of the Ohio River; a number of Rickeys live in Portsmouth today. The Rickeys came from an area as much southern as northern, where the local dialect consists of a nasal twang, not quite southern but not northern either. Religious belief and religious fervor were strong.
Rickey was one of four children, but two died in infancy. He and his surviving brother, Orla Edwin, played sports (Orla was a left-handed pitcher). Following high school, Rickey taught at a one-room school, Turkey Creek, several miles from his home. Southern Ohio is very hilly country, never having been flattened by Ice Age glaciers like those that scraped the northern part of the state. Rickey commuted up and down those hills, riding a bicycle to school.
At age nineteen Rickey packed up his things and traveled to Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU), in Delaware, Ohio, some 105 miles away from his boyhood home and 15 miles or so northwest of Columbus, the state capital. He struggled with studies there, competing with classmates who had had the benefit of a more rounded and advanced high school education than he had. Eventually, Rickey excelled in the classroom, as he had done in sports from the beginning.
While a student at OWU, Rickey played football and baseball, the latter as a catcher. By playing for the Shelby Ohio professional football team, for spending money, Rickey lost his amateur status and could no longer play for OWU teams. It did not much matter. By showing leadership skills and maturity at an early age (the academics took a bit longer), Rickey became the baseball team’s coach as well as a player. After he lost his playing eligibility, he continued on as the team’s field manager-coach.
OWU graduated Rickey in 1904. His first full-time position was as athletic director, football coach, and baseball coach at Allegheny College, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, about seventy-five miles directly north of Pittsburgh, where he spent two years and worked on a master’s degree. He spent summers as a backup catcher for the St. Louis Browns.
In June 1906 he married Jane Moulton, a longtime sweetheart. The ceremony took place in Lucasville, Ohio, another southern Ohio town, fifteen miles directly north of Portsmouth. Branch and Jane were to have five daughters and a son (Branch Jr., known as “Twig”) and were husband and wife for fifty-nine and a half years.
OWU beckoned Rickey back from Pennsylvania, offering Rickey the position of athletic director and baseball coach if he would leave Allegheny (no more football, for which Rickey was grateful—his Allegheny teams had not done well). While at OWU Rickey, ever the devout Methodist, would neither play nor coach baseball on Sundays. The teetotaling Rickey also stumped throughout Ohio, making speeches for the Anti-Saloon League, because as a good Methodist he was firmly against drink.
In 1908 Rickey’s scholarly side remerged. He left Delaware, Ohio, to enter the University of Michigan School of Law in Ann Arbor, 150 miles to the north. His departure was never permanent, as Rickey remained a loyal and active OWU alumnus all his life, including many years as a trustee of the school. Burning with energy, though, Rickey also coached the University of Michigan baseball team in his years there as a law student (1909–11).
The great Hall of Famer George Sisler first played for Rickey while both were students at the University of Michigan. Sisler rejoined Rickey in St. Louis as a Brown, in 1915. After a fifteen-year All-Star career, Sisler too became a coach. He and Rickey stayed close friends all their lives.
After Rickey finished law school, Jane and Branch went west, to Boise, Idaho, where Rickey opened a law practice with two of his Michigan classmates. The strong pull of baseball, as well as the lack of gravitational pull in a faltering Idaho law practice, soon lured Rickey back to the Midwest and to professional baseball. He could not shrug off his devotion to the game.
On June 13, 1913, Rickey started work as assistant general manager and business manager of the St. Louis Browns. Rickey, though, did not get on well with the Browns owner, St. Louis ice king Phil Ball, who had recently purchased the team, so in 1916 Rickey jumped to the crosstown organization, the St. Louis Cardinals.
The Cardinals, too, had recently changed ownership. The new owner was Sam “Singing Sam” Breadon. From New York, Sam was “a boisterous, fun-loving man who loved to sing in barbershop quartets. The Bible-quoting, psalm-singing Rickey couldn’t have been more different yet they functioned well together.”59 Breadon held the title of president; Rickey, who held the title of vice president, functioned as the general manager.
Breadon introduced a baseball staple, seldom seen today, the Sunday doubleheader. Rickey managed the team, including Rogers “The Rajah” Hornsby, possibly the greatest right-handed hitter in the history of the game (.397 in 1921, .401 in 1922), and later the 1930s Gashouse Gang, the nickname for the colorful and rip-roaring Cardinal team that won the 1934 World Series.
Rickey was to manage the Cardinals and their front office for twenty-one years, interrupted only by his World War I service. In the “war to end all wars,” Rickey saw extensive action in France, as a major heading up an artillery support unit that included Ty Cobb and Christy “The Christian Gentleman” Mathewson. Rickey and Mathewson, of course, go down as two prominent baseball personages who refused to play on Sundays (just as decades later, Dodgers Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax refused to pitch on the Jewish high holidays).
Rickey kept book on hundreds of baseball players, amateur and professional, carrying everywhere he went “a big, over-stuffed black loose-leaf notebook.”60 He used his book and Cardinals’ money to purchase outright, or controlling interests in, twenty-eight Minor League baseball clubs: the Houston Buffaloes of the Texas League, Fort Smith of the Class C Western League, and Syracuse of the International League, all of whose players were, directly or indirectly, under contract with the Cardinals. Other Cardinals farm clubs included St. Joseph, Missouri, and Topeka, Kansas. He caused the Cardinals to conduct mass tryouts in places such as Shawnee, Oklahoma, and Danville, Illinois. Creation of the farm system is said to be “Rickey’s greatest baseball innovation.”61 Incidentally, the farm system also provided Rickey with a source of ample additional income.
The 1942 Cardinals won the National League pennant. They went on to defeat the New York Yankees in the World Series. Despite the success of the team under Rickey, however, a few weeks later owner Sam Breadon and the Cardinals announced that they would not offer Branch Rickey another five-year contract. Instead, Rickey would be moving to New York to succeed Larry McPhail as president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
From that position Rickey planned and launched the first steps at integration of Major League Baseball, overcoming numerous obstacles in his path and bringing Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers.
“If you worked for Branch Rickey, sooner or later you would inevitably come under a searching moral microscope.”62 Rickey often quoted favorite sayings, spouting them for his underlings, his players, and acquaintances as prescriptions for life as well as a tape measure with which to size up one’s past. Rickey’s aphorisms tell as much about Rickey the man as any biographical sketch can do:
Measure your conduct against “the scoreboard of life.”63
Men who sin in haste often repent in leisure.64
Look for the best in everybody, but don’t allow first impressions to sway you.
Men are what they make of themselves. Education never stops.
Nine times out of ten a man fashions his own destiny.
You get out of life what you put into it.
Discipline should come from within and be self-imposed.
It is not the honor you take with you but the heritage you leave behind.65
My father was a Wesley, Joseph Wesley, rather than Wesley Branch. He too was raised on a farm, by devout Methodist parents, George Mortimer and Ada Alice. After high school, as with Branch Rickey, Joseph Wesley taught in a one-room school up in the hills. The only difference is that Wesley Branch rode a bicycle, while Joseph Wesley rode a horse (a mean stallion named Prince) to school. My father attended a Methodist university, West Virginia Wesleyan, rather than Ohio Wesleyan in the state next door, which Wesley Branch attended. Joseph Wesley, like Wesley Branch, excelled at football and, in his youth, ran track rather than play baseball. In photos of the two men in middle age, they bear a resemblance to each other.
The similarities do not end there. I know what my father was made of. I imagine that Branch Rickey was much the same. Even given their flaws, and there do not seem to have been a few, both—Joseph Wesley and Wesley Branch—were great men who led great lives, whom I very much admire, and with whom I feel a strong and lasting bond.