2

Making It

Rogers Hornsby found himself with the St. Louis Cardinals early in September 1915 because of unique circumstances throughout baseball that year, especially for indigent franchises such as the Cardinals. Menaced by the Federal League, which in 1914 had proclaimed itself a major circuit and gone after players wherever they might be available, both the National and American League teams struggled to keep their rosters intact. While baseball’s top performers—Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Tris Speaker, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Eddie Collins, among others—stayed put under multiyear contracts providing hefty pay raises, a considerable number of second- and third-level major-leaguers, as well as players in the upper minors, cast their lots with the Federals.

The talent-depleting effect of the Federal League and the lean finances of the St. Louis Cardinals created an opening for a nineteen-year-old with two seasons of undistinguished Class D experience to jump all the way to the top of Organized Baseball. Without the “Federal League war,” as baseball people came to call it, Hornsby wouldn’t have been in Cincinnati on September 3, 1915.

“The St. Louis Cardinals have a new player on trial in the person of Dick Hornsby, a product of the lots of Fort Worth, where he began with a team made up of stockyards huskies,” reported the Sporting News in its weekly National League Notes.1 (For nearly a year, the press around the league would continue to get the youngster’s name wrong, until he explained to everybody that he was named “Rogers,” after his mother’s family.) Hornsby joined the Cardinals after a two-day train trip from Denison to Fort Worth to Cincinnati, traveling the entire 1,200 miles by day coach.

The ballclub with which he signed a contract (for $200 for the rest of the season) had made a good showing into July, then, as usual, faded from contention. When Hornsby joined them, the 1915 Cardinals rested in fourth place with a 63–66 record. Near the end of his playing career but still at second base most days, Cardinals manager Miller Huggins directed a few solid major-leaguers—but only a few.

Frank Snyder was a fine young catcher, and outfielder–first baseman Jack Miller had been a steady performer since his rookie season in 1909 with the world’s champion Pittsburgh Pirates. Spitballer Bill Doak, a twenty-game winner in 1914, and Harry “Slim” Sallee, a tall left-hander who’d posted eighteen wins in each of the two previous seasons, were Huggins’s pitching mainstays, while Lee Meadows, the only bespectacled player in the majors, was on his way to a 13–11 record in his rookie year.

Otherwise, the Cardinals consisted of players who would never amount to much, plus dimming former stars such as Bob Bescher, once a champion base stealer with Cincinnati; Owen “Chief” Wilson, who’d hit a record thirty-six triples (with Pittsburgh) three seasons earlier; and Leon “Red” Ames, formerly a mound stalwart for John McGraw’s New York Giants.

At a time when television was a fantasy and the sixteen National and American League teams were all located in the northeastern quadrant of the United States, it wasn’t unusual for ballplayers to take part in the first major-league game they ever saw. For Rogers Hornsby, who’d never before traveled north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, it was a matter of donning a gray, red-trimmed visitors’ uniform and then watching from the dugout as Meadows outpitched the Reds’ Pete Schneider for a 3–1 win.

After that the Cardinals returned to St. Louis to begin a home stand that would last almost to the end of the season. Light-hitting Artie Butler remained at shortstop; Hornsby remained on the bench. Meanwhile Hornsby moved into a boardinghouse where several other Cardinals bachelors resided, on St. Louis’s north side near Robison Field, the team’s home ballpark.

In that thriving Mississippi River city of more than 700,000—the United States’ fifth most populous in the 1910 federal census—young Hornsby repeatedly got lost, even in the immediate area where he lived. It was a strange environment in many ways, not only in its size and complexity but also in its diverse population, which included many “foreigners” speaking with peculiar accents, if they spoke English at all. Since the middle of the previous century, St. Louis’s population had been substantially German-American; among the various European peoples arriving in recent decades, Italians predominated.

Yet unlike what Georgian Ty Cobb, for example, had encountered when he arrived in Detroit ten years earlier, Hornsby found St. Louis’s racial mores little different from what he was used to in Texas and neighboring states. In matters of race and in many other respects, St. Louis (as well as East St. Louis, Illinois, a city of some 60,000 across the river) remained decidedly southern. By Missouri law, municipal ordinance, and ingrained custom, the 50,000 or so black St. Louisians were segregated in everything from housing, transportation, and entertainment to worship, schooling, and burial practices.

Athletically, whites competed in their own spheres in high schools, at St. Louis and Washington Universities, on sandlot and municipal baseball teams, and in professional baseball. White sports fans knew scarcely more of the St. Louis Giants, a professional baseball club with a dedicated following among local black residents, than of the athletes performing at Sumner and Vashon, the city’s black high schools.

In the major leagues (including the short-lived Federal League) and the whole of Organized Baseball, “for whites only” was the ruling policy—even if that policy was never officially acknowledged. So, although the young white ballplayer from Texas encountered black St. Louisians on the streets, at trolley stops, and even at Robison Field (where they sat in a separate section of the bleachers), for the most part he lived and worked in a white world, mingling with but generally ignoring “colored people.”

Situated at the intersection of Vandeventer Avenue and Natural Bridge Road and across from the fairgrounds, Robison Field was six blocks from Sportsman’s Park, home of the American League Browns, and not far from the Federal League Terriers’ home base. Named for owner Helene Robison Britton’s father, Robison Field was one of only two surviving American or National League facilities constructed entirely of wood.2 Though far bigger, structurally it wasn’t much of an improvement over the ballparks Hornsby had known in the minors—certainly not the equal of Cincinnati’s steel-and-concrete Redland Field, the first big-league facility he saw. Occupied by the St. Louis National Leaguers since 1893, Robison Field could accommodate about 15,000 customers (on seats that usually needed a coat of paint) in its single-deck grandstand and its bleachers in left and right field. The distance down the right-field foul line was 320 feet; the closest point in left field was 380 feet away; and dead center field was 435 feet from home plate. With the plate set 120 feet from the grandstand backstop, Robison Field offered plenty of room in foul territory for catchers and first and third basemen. It was a pitcher’s park even by the standards of the first two decades of the century, when pitchers generally held the upper hand.

Hornsby arrived, remembered Dick Farrington of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “with a badger haircut, a carpetbag, and $2.85 in a three-compartment pocketbook.” John B. Sheridan, another longtime St. Louis sportswriter, recalled rookie Hornsby as a scrawny, “hollow chested, large footed, gangling boy,” yet also noted his “good forehead, straight nose, firm mouth and chin and particularly level, determined eyebrows.”3 Deeply dimpled and slightly buck-toothed, he possessed a fresh-faced, wholesome look, even if he wasn’t a particularly handsome youngster.

Hornsby also wasn’t “soiled by being half-educated,” as Sheridan remembered him, which was probably a polite way of saying that the Texan was, in the Victorian phrase, a “callow youth”—raw, ill-mannered, generally innocent of the world.4 He spoke with a high-pitched, thwangy north Texas accent; his grammar would have dismayed his third-grade teacher, and so would the pungent vocabulary he’d learned working around stockyards people.

At five-foot-eleven-and-a-half and 135 pounds, Hornsby was an inch or so taller but also lighter by about forty pounds than the typical major-league ballplayer. “As a hitter,” Sheridan recalled, “he looked especially impotent.”5 Still holding his bat at the end and taking full swings, the youngster soon found that he couldn’t handle big-league pitching. Both manager Huggins and Bob Connery worked with him after games, getting him to crowd the plate and choke up on a thick-handled bat—the accepted style at a time when the “dead ball” made free-swinging generally ineffective.

Huggins finally put him into a game on Friday, September 10. With the Cardinals trailing Cincinnati 7–0 after six innings, much of the crowd of 2,000 or so had left by the time Hornsby took over for Butler at shortstop. Nothing much happened the rest of the way, except that the home team managed one run in the eighth inning. Hornsby had no chances in the field and went hitless in two times at bat against rookie right-hander Charles “King” Lear. Except for listing him in the box score, local accounts of the game ignored Hornsby in favor of pitcher Fred Lamline, newly arrived from the Three-I League, who relieved Meadows and held the Reds scoreless over the final three innings.

Hornsby sat out the games versus Brooklyn on Saturday and Sunday, then discovered his name penciled into the starting lineup when he got to Robison Field on Monday. Jack Coombs, onetime American League star, held the rookie hitless in beating St. Louis 6–2. The next day (September 14) Hornsby recorded his first big-league base hit: a single off Brooklyn’s Richard “Rube” Marquard, a tall left-hander who’d posted nineteen straight victories for the New York Giants three years earlier.

Huggins gave the kid a pretty thorough looking-over, keeping him at shortstop for all of the Cardinals’ remaining fifteen games. Always hitting eighth in the batting order and gripping the bat about six inches from the handle, he punched and chopped at pitches, seldom striking out but also seldom hitting the ball hard. He did manage a double—his first extra-base hit—off Grover Cleveland Alexander of pennant-bound Philadelphia, and in his first meeting with the illustrious John McGraw and his last-place New York Giants, he touched burly Charles “Jeff” Tesreau for two singles.6

All told, he made fourteen hits in fifty-seven official times at bat, for a batting average of .246. All his hits were singles except for two doubles, and he drove in only four runs and scored five. At shortstop he continued to show the same faults—overanxiousness and an erratic throwing arm—that had plagued him at Denison, and he erred at about the same rate (eight errors in eighteen games). Teammates became impatient with his rookie mistakes; when he covered second base on a steal attempt and dropped Frank Snyder’s throw, Snyder gave him a thorough chewing-out in the dugout.

Finishing in sixth place with a record of 72–81 (with one lost rain-out in the 154-game schedule), the Cardinals obviously needed help. But Hornsby’s dreary showing in the six games of the annual postseason “city series” with the Browns—two hits in twenty at bats and four errors—did nothing to convince Huggins that the nineteen-year-old from Class D would be of much use to him in 1916. When Hornsby came to Huggins after the Cardinals finished the season and asked about his prospects, the manager replied, “Kid, you’re a little light, but you got the makings. I think I’ll farm you out for a year.”7

As implausible as it may seem, Hornsby completely mistook Huggins’s meaning—that the Cardinals would probably assign him to a minor-league club for 1916 and let him get more experience. Hornsby thought Huggins was telling him to spend the off-season on a farm, which is exactly what he proceeded to do. “I was just a country boy, with only three or four weeks in the big cities,” Hornsby remembered, “so I took him at his word.” Instead of moving back in with his mother in North Fort Worth, he went to his uncle H. T. Rainey’s farm at Lockhart, south of Austin. There he spent the fall and winter months helping out with chores, tramping the woods with a shotgun in search of game birds, sleeping twelve hours a night, and consuming steak and fried chicken and “all the milk I could hold.”8

Meanwhile the Cardinals secured an option to buy a flashy shortstop named Roy Corhan from San Francisco of the Pacific Coast League, and Huggins predicted that Corhan would be his regular at the position in 1916. According to what one local sportswriter later claimed, the Cardinals offered to sell Hornsby to Little Rock of the Class A Southern Association for $500. Although that was $100 less than what they’d paid Denison for Hornsby’s contract, the price was still too steep for the Little Rock ownership!

If young Hornsby’s baseball future seemed less than promising that winter, the outlook for the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns and the National and American Leagues as a whole brightened considerably. After two years of heavy financial losses, the Federal League promoters agreed to disband in exchange for generous compensation from the established leagues. Part of the settlement allowed Charles Weeghman, owner of the Chicago Federal League franchise, to purchase the National League Chicago Cubs, and Philip deCatesby Ball, who owned the St. Louis Terriers, bought the Browns from Robert Lee Hedges. As Weeghman did at Chicago, Ball amalgamated players from his former and his new teams. Ball also bought Sportsman’s Park from Hedges, whereas Weeghman moved the Cubs into the modern ballpark on Chicago’s North Side built for his Federal League Whales.

The Baltimore Federal League group sought to buy the Cardinals with the intent of moving them to Baltimore but were closed out of the settlement. So the Cardinals remained in St. Louis, where at least they wouldn’t have to compete with a Federal League entry that almost won a pennant in 1915 and outdrew both the Cardinals and the Browns.9

Hornsby received his 1916 contract at his uncle’s farm at Lockhart. It specified a season’s salary of $2,000—$333.33 per month, figured the way he’d reckoned his pay in Class D. Without delay, he signed the contract and put it in the return mail. Not only was he being offered a healthy wage by prevailing workforce standards (if, that is, he survived the roster cut at the start of the season), but in the retrenching aftermath of the costly Federal League war, it was as much as a nominal rookie could expect.

Besides, neither Hornsby nor anybody else within Organized Baseball had any alternative but to sign the contracts offered them. Under the reserve clause, initially adopted by the National League back in 1879, a franchise possessed exclusive rights to resign a particular player for the coming season, unless it sold, traded, or released him. A player might grumble about his salary and delay signing, or even refuse to play and hold out for more, but if he wanted to continue to earn a living within Organized Baseball, he eventually must come to terms with the franchise holding him under reserve.

The necessarily tightfisted Cardinals management again scheduled spring training for Hot Wells, Texas. Located on the southern outskirts of San Antonio, Hot Wells was a village that included a seedy hotel (the Terrell) and a mineral springs catering to people who sought the restorative and curative benefits of the waters but couldn’t afford the more famous spa at Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Hot Wells’s baseball facilities consisted of an unfenced field next to the hotel. No diamond had been laid out, so the ballplayers stepped off the distances themselves and put down bases. They dressed at the hotel and, at the end of practice, returned for showers and soaks in tanks full of mineral water. Only twenty-eight men were on hand, both because the ballclub couldn’t cover food and lodging for a larger number and because, under the roster limitation imposed during the Federal League war, only twenty-one places were available anyway.

Citizens from the San Antonio area south and west to the Rio Grande were in a jittery mood that spring. On March 18, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ordered a U.S. Army expedition led by General John J. Pershing into northern Mexico in an effort to apprehend the bandit caudillo Francisco “Pancho” Villa, whose followers had raided trains and towns along the U.S.-Mexico border and killed a number of U.S. citizens. Pershing’s force marched 300 miles into Mexico, and while it never caught up with the wily Villa, its operations brought the Wilson administration into conflict with the revolutionary government of Venustiano Carranza in Mexico City—and perilously close to outright war.

Little of that or anything else except baseball concerned young Rogers Hornsby as he packed his bag, said good-bye to his Lockhart relatives, and caught a train for San Antonio, about seventy-five miles away. His determination to build himself up physically had paid off; he reported to Huggins about thirty pounds heavier and, as he later put it, “I had the power.” Wrote one observer, “Hornsby was hardly recognized when he appeared. He has grown from a gangling boy into a well-developed physical specimen.” “It’s all good, solid weight, too,” enthused another at the scene. “The additional poundage has made him much stronger.”10

Huggins was also in for a surprise when Hornsby first took batting practice. Instead of standing close to home plate, crouching, and choking the bat, he returned to the batting style he’d used at Denison. Taking his position in the batter’s box as far back and away from the plate as he could, he stood nearly upright with feet about eighteen inches apart, held the bat well away from his body, and gripped it at the very end. To be able to cover the strike zone from that stance, he stood with his left foot a little closer to the plate than his back foot, stepped into the pitch at a forty-five-degree angle to the pitcher, and took a full swing using a thirty-six-inch, thirty-eight- to forty-ounce bat with a relatively thin handle.

As Hornsby slammed line drives to all parts of the field, Huggins, Connery, and everybody else stopped to watch. He also impressed observers as “a real hustler, always on the jump”; like his brother Everett, he quickly acquired the nickname “Pep.” Although Huggins was skeptical about his future at shortstop, he did acknowledge, “Hornsby gives great promise for a third baseman.” Twelve years later, John B. Sheridan recalled the Hornsby of 1916 as having undergone “what appeared to be a spiritual and physical metamorphosis.”11

Hornsby roomed with Roy Corhan, the man he needed to beat out for a place on the team.12 In mid-March Corhan hurt his shoulder and couldn’t get the ball across the infield, but Artie Butler played shortstop in early exhibition games against the Texas League San Antonio Broncos. Although Hornsby finally got into the lineup on March 18, doubling and driving in a run against the Broncos, when the team broke camp a few days later, Butler accompanied the regulars for stops at Houston and other cities on the way to St. Louis. Hornsby traveled with the second squad for games at Sherman and Denison (where his appearance as a former Railroader occasioned mild applause).

With everybody reassembled in St. Louis, Huggins put Hornsby at shortstop for the traditional preseason series with the Browns. Although “Roger” (as his name was still being rendered) missed two games of the seven-game set with an outbreak of neck boils, he proceeded to solidify his place on the team by making five singles and three doubles in five games, erring but once, and generally impressing the fans at Sportsman’s Park and Robison Field with his hustling style. “Hornsby cannot be denied,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s W. J. O’Connor, “and regardless of Roy Corhan’s condition, the milk-fed fiend will desport himself at short.”13

Still a few weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, Hornsby appeared extraordinarily glib and self-confident, which must have struck Cardinals veterans as decidedly unrookie-like. “I never touched beer in my life and as far as I know, whisky is a hair tonic,” he bragged to O’Connor (or so O’Connor quoted him). “Lady Nicotine and I never mix, so I’m a second edition of the ideal boy.” When Hornsby threw high to first base in one of the games with the Browns and Jack Smith speared it, trotted into the infield, and yelled encouragingly, “Nice play, Pep. I made it look a little hard,” Hornsby yelled back, “Never mind that, Jack. Just stick around that bag and I’ll make a first baseman out of you.” Added O’Connor, “What colossal nerve! But it wins.”14

Partly nerve but mostly his newfound batting prowess put Hornsby in the lineup at shortstop on April 12, when the Cardinals opened the season at home versus Pittsburgh. His counterpart at shortshop for the Pirates was forty-two-year-old Honus Wagner, one of the Texan’s boyhood idols. Whatever meaning that may have had for the cocky young Texan was never recorded, but the box score showed that Hornsby, seventh in Huggins’s batting order, drove in both runs with two singles, as “Spittin’ Bill” Doak pitched a six-hit, 2–1 victory.

Obviously Huggins had a real prospect on his hands, and so Hornsby stayed in the lineup as both Roy Corhan and Artie Butler spent most of their time on the bench. A month into the season, Hornsby was being described as “about the most popular athlete that ever wore a Cardinal uniform.” Although he was still shaky in the field and, by one account, “a weird base runner[,] and the coacher has yet to be sent to the lines who can aid him apparently,” long-suffering St. Louis fans, who appreciated ability and allowed for youth, made him one of their favorites.15

The 1916 Cardinals were a bad team, falling out of contention early and finishing in a tie with Cincinnati for seventh place—more than thirty games behind first-place Brooklyn. At season’s end, one of the few consolations for die-hard Cardinals fans was the showing of Rogers (as he was finally being called by late summer) Hornsby, who’d established himself as one of baseball’s outstanding young players.

On May 14, at Robison Field, Hornsby recorded his first major-league home run (his eighth in Organized Baseball). Hit off Brooklyn’s Edward “Jeff” Pfeffer, it was a freak blow that landed behind third base, skipped into foul territory, and then bounced into the stands—a homer by pre-1931 rules. His first “legitimate” home run came nine days later, when he drove the ball over Boston center fielder Fred Snodgrass’s head and outran the relay throw to score standing up. Longtime Robison Field fans agreed it was one of the longest hits ever made on the home grounds. On June 28 he pushed his batting average to .300 by registering two singles, two triples, and a home run in a victory at Cincinnati that closed a long road trip. “Hornsby is the ‘find’ of 1916,” announced O’Connor.16

As the team’s leading hitter, Hornsby moved up in the batting order—to fifth and then fourth place. He also moved all over the diamond, playing every infield position at one time or another and making forty-five errors. For most of the last half of the season, Huggins put him at third base; in an interview with a writer for Baseball Magazine, Hornsby agreed that third might be his natural position.

Voicing a view he would reiterate in coming decades, he said it was easier to hit in the major leagues than in the minors, mainly because big-league pitchers possessed better control and a hitter could usually expect to get at least one pitch to his liking. As for his own style, swinging from the end of the bat, he declared, had always been “my natural bent.”17

In July the Sporting News captioned Hornsby’s photograph “best youngster in National [League]” and “a star of the first water.” Local baseball writers and knowledgeable fans compared his versatile talents with those of the Browns’ George Sisler, whose strong batting and adroit first-base play in his second year in the majors had about persuaded manager Fielder Jones to forget Sisler’s pitching potential. Miller Huggins called Hornsby “the greatest free-swinging hitter in baseball,” while an unnamed veteran pitcher was impressed by the youngster’s ability to wait for a good pitch, terming him “as cold as ice.” “The fellow hits the hardest ball I have ever seen,” enthused Brooklyn manager Wilbert Robinson, who’d been in baseball since 1885. “He gets distance because of a perfect stride.… he doesn’t seem to swing hard. He strides into the ball perfectly; he’s never off balance.” Queried about how he came by his ability with the bat, Hornsby replied (as his accent was rendered), “I simplay cain’t help it.”18

In mid-August Charles Weeghman telegraphed the Brittons an offer to buy Hornsby for his Chicago Cubs (for an unpublicized sum), and Brooklyn put out feelers about a deal that would send shortstop Ollie O’Mara and outfielder Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel to St. Louis for Hornsby and $20,000. Thus began a long series of efforts by other National League clubs to obtain Hornsby’s services. Refusing cash they needed badly, the Brittons announced that while they might trade Hornsby or other sought-after Cardinals such as Lee Meadows and Frank Snyder for comparable players, they wouldn’t sell anybody outright.

Hornsby missed eleven games in late August and early September after he sprained an ankle sliding into home plate. Although the Cardinals lost their last twelve games of the season (all away from home), he kept registering base hits and ended with a .313 average. That was sixty-six points above the average for the National League as a whole and fourth in the league behind batting champion Hal Chase of Cincinnati (who hit .339), Pittsburgh’s Bill Hinchman, and Brooklyn’s Jake Daubert. Hornsby led his teammates with six home runs (Philadelphia’s Clifford “Gavvy” Cravath hit twelve), thirteen triples (third in the league), and sixty runs driven in (twenty-three less than the league’s best). Although he wasn’t and never would be a daring base runner, he also stole seventeen bases.

The Browns bested the Cardinals four games to one in a desultory city series that drew only about 14,000. Hornsby headed home with his loser’s share of forty dollars and what was left of his season’s salary, after he’d paid his own expenses and mailed part of each paycheck to his mother. With no off-season weight-gain program scheduled, he settled in with his mother in North Fort Worth and went to work at Swift and Company as a checker on the loading docks. He could look forward to next spring with his place on the Cardinals secure; Roy Corhan would again be playing in the Pacific Coast League, and Artie Butler had received his outright release.

Meanwhile the Brittons’ marriage fell apart; Miller Huggins ended up having to return to St. Louis from his home in Cincinnati to testify in the divorce proceeding. Helene Robison Britton declared herself president of the Cardinals; anybody on her ballclub, she declared, was for sale or trade—except Rogers Hornsby.

When Weeghman renewed his efforts to acquire Hornsby, she declared that she wouldn’t exchange him for the whole Chicago Cubs roster. That was so much bravado; although she rejected Weeghman’s offer of $75,000 cash, indications are that she and Huggins would have been ready to deal Hornsby for Jim “Hippo” Vaughn and another frontline pitcher—plus cash—had Weeghman been so inclined.

But what she really wanted, now that she was ridding herself of Schuyler Britton, was also to be free of the bothersome and unprofitable baseball franchise she inherited. As the Cardinals players again began gathering at what a local writer called “the hard-boiled, wind-swept plateau which has been dignified by the name of Hot Wells,” a syndicate of 110 St. Louis businessmen and civic leaders, headed by James C. Jones, paid her $25,000 for a sixty-day option to buy the ballclub for $250,000.19 Two weeks later Jones signed a purchase agreement on behalf of the syndicate and made an initial $75,000 down payment.

To direct their new property as franchise president, Jones and his associates signed Wesley Branch Rickey to a three-year contract at $15,000 per year. A thirty-five-year-old native of Stockdale, Ohio, Rickey had managed the Browns from 1913 through 1915 and then, the past year, moved into the front office as Browns vice president and business manager. A pious Methodist who wouldn’t go to the ballpark on Sunday (but assiduously counted gate receipts on Monday morning), Rickey was also a relentlessly determined man who’d played briefly in the American League (as a light-hitting catcher), coached baseball and other sports to pay his way through Ohio Wesleyan College and the University of Michigan law school, and then fought off tuberculosis.

Robert Lee Hedges, the Browns’ owner until 1916, liked and admired Rickey, especially after Rickey maneuvered the University of Michigan’s George Sisler away from the Pittsburgh Pirates. But Rickey’s relationship with Phil Ball, who bought the Browns as part of the Federal League settlement, was an unhappy one. Rickey didn’t like being kicked upstairs in favor of Fielder Jones, Ball’s Federal League manager; and Ball didn’t appreciate Rickey’s penchant for quoting the Bible and launching into long-winded, polysyllabic discourses on baseball, among many other subjects. For Ball, a sparsely educated, self-made millionaire, Rickey was a pretentious know-it-all whose services he could do without.

Although nobody realized it at the time, Branch Rickey’s arrival as president of the St. Louis Cardinals in the spring of 1917 would profoundly alter the history not only of that franchise but of all Organized Baseball. It was an event that also critically affected the future of young Rogers Hornsby. For the next two decades the professional lives of Rickey and Hornsby would be closely—yet ambivalently—intertwined.