In 1955, Sports Illustrated’s Gerald Holland interviewed
perhaps the most famous front office man in baseball history—Branch Rickey.
Although widely credited for integrating the majors by
signing Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, that shouldn’t define
Rickey, as he had a long an diverse career in the sport.
It took him quite a while to find success. He began as a player,
playing catcher and outfield in parts of four seasons with the St. Louis Browns
and New York Yankees. However, hitting .239 with three home runs (although it
was the Deadball Era) in 120 total games didn’t win him a permanent job, and he
had to find another way to stay in the game.
He managed
the Browns and St. Louis Cardinals for 10 seasons but finished with a sub-.500
record and only reached as high as a third place finish twice during that time.
Rickey found his greatest success in the front office. From
1919 to 1955 he served as the general manager and president of the Cardinals,
Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates. In addition to his groundbreaking collaboration
with Robinson, he was innovative throughout his career, as he championed
things like scouting, the farm system development, and the use of batting
helmets among others.
He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1967—two
years after he passed away at the age of 83. One of the greatest pioneers in
the game’s history, it was a richly deserved honor.
The Holland interview is intriguing insight into the great executive.
Reading the entire piece is well worth the time. However, for the sake of closer
inspection, I am pulling out what I believe to be the most interesting portions
of Rickey’s statements during the interview, and including my own thoughts in
italics.
On his vow to never
play baseball on Sundays: "Of my career in baseball, let us say first
of all that there have been the appearances of hypocrisy. Here we have the
Sunday school mollycoddle, apparently professing a sort of public virtue in
refraining from playing or watching a game of baseball on Sunday. And yet at
the same time he is not above accepting money from a till replenished by Sunday
baseball.
A deeply personal thing. Something not to be exploited, not
to be put forward protestingly at every whisper of criticism. No, a deeply
personal thing. A man's promise, a promise to his mother. Not involving a
condemnation of baseball on Sunday, nor of others who might desire to play it
or watch it on Sunday. Simply one man's promise—and it might as well have been
a promise not to attend the theater or band concerts in the park."
Rickey’s refusal to
play ball on the Sabbath has always been one of those baseball maxims used as a
general tool to describe him as a person. The clarification he provides about
how he came about this standard, and how he very clearly refutes it being a
morality issue, is refreshing to say the least.
On Some of His
Contributions to Baseball: "More than a half-century spent in the game
and now it is suggested that I give thought to some of the ideas and
innovations with which I have been associated. The question arises, 'Which of
these can be said to have contributed most to making baseball truly our
national game?'
First, I should say, there was the mass production of
ballplayers. The Cardinals were three years ahead of all the other
clubs in establishing try-out camps. We looked at 4,000 boys a year. Then, of
course, we had to have teams on which to place boys with varying degrees of ability
and experience. That brought into being the farm system.
There were other ideas not ordinarily remembered. With
the St. Louis Browns, under Mr. Hedges, we originated the idea of Ladies
Day, a very important step forward. Probably no other innovation did so much to
give baseball respectability, as well as thousands of new fans.”
The importance of the
contributions of Rickey to the modern concept of minor league farm systems and
advanced scouting cannot be overstated. Teams’ ability to plan and build for
the future made it much easier to compete with organizations with deeper
pockets and greater cache, like the New York Yankees.
The Boston Red Sox,
Tampa Bay Rays and St. Louis Cardinals are the best current examples of the
unlimited possibilities that can be reaped by embracing Rickey’s innovations.
Really, it’s one of the greatest things a team can have—the ability to be
successful on a self-sustainable level.
On His Role Bringing
Jackie Robinson to the Majors: "Some honors have been tendered. Some
honorary degrees offered because of my part in bringing Jackie Robinson into
the major leagues.
No, no, no. I have declined them all. To accept honors,
public applause for signing a superlative ballplayer to a contract? I would
be ashamed!"
Regardless of how modest
he was regarding being the front-office man to finally sign a black player;
Rickey will always be congratulated for his role in integrating the game. He
may have done nothing more than simply the “right thing,” but doing so in the
staunchly segregated majors took a certain degree of chutzpah that only an
executive of his reputation would have been able to pull off.
On The Process of
Identifying Robinson as the First Player to Integrate the Majors: "I
talked to sociologists and to Negro leaders. With their counsel, I worked out
what I considered to be the six essential points to be considered.
Number one, the man we finally chose had to be right off the
field…
Number two, he had to be right on the field. If he turned
out to be a lemon, our efforts would fail for that reason alone.
Number three, the reaction of his own race had to be right.
Number four, the reaction of press and public had to be
right.
Number five, we had to have a place to put him.
Number six, the reaction of his fellow players had to be
right.
In Jackie Robinson, we found the man to take care of points
one and two. He was eminently right off and on the field. We did not settle
on Robinson until after we had invested $25,000 in scouting for a man
whose name we did not then know.
Having found Robinson, we proceeded to point five. We
had to have a place to put him. Luckily, in the Brooklyn organization, we
had exactly the spot at Montreal where the racial issue would not be
given undue emphasis.
To take care of point three, the reaction of Robinson's
own race, I went again to the Negro leaders. I explained that in order to give
this boy his chance, there must be no demonstrations in his behalf, no
excursions from one city to another, no presentations or testimonials. He was
to be left alone to do this thing without any more hazards than were already
present. For two years the men I talked to respected the reasoning behind my
requests. My admiration for these men is limitless. In the best possible way,
they saw to it that Jackie Robinson had his chance to make it on his
own.
Point four, the reaction of press and public, resolved
itself in the course of things, and point six, the reaction of his fellow
players, finally—if painfully—worked itself out."
Rickey’s detailing of
the process he went through in identifying a course of action for Robinson is
fascinating. In particular, his consultation of black community leaders is a
part of the story rarely recounted in the re-tellings of the MLB integration
narrative.
What was needed to make
a success out of Robinson was an elaborate scheme of infinite layers, with
Rickey thinking years into the future and of scenarios far from the playing
field. Although Robinson had a tough go of it, the remarkable grace and poise
he showed in his career demonstrates the great pay-off from the detailed
planning.
On the Best Pitchers
He Ever Saw: "The greatest pitchers I have ever seen were Christy
Mathewson and Jerome “Dizzy” Dean.
Mathewson could throw every pitch in the book. But he was
economical. If he saw that he could win a game with three kinds of pitches, he
would use only three. Jerome, on the other hand, had a tendency to run in the
direction of experimentation. Murry Dickson has a fine assortment of
pitches, but he feels an obligation to run through his entire repertory in
every game.
Yes, Murry is the sort of pitcher who will go along
splendidly until the eighth inning and then apparently say to himself: 'Oh,
dear me, I have forgotten to throw my half-speed ball!' And then and there he
will throw it."
Two of Rickey’s
choices are fairly easy picks.
Mathewson won 373
games and had a 2.13 ERA in a 17-year career. Although his teams only won one
World Series, they made four appearances, and the right-hander became perhaps
the greatest postseason pitcher of all-time, with a 0.97 ERA and four shutouts
in 11 starts.
Because of injury,
Dean had a small window of dominance, but when he was good, he was very good.
Pitching for the Cardinals from 1932 through 1936, he won a total of 120 games
and had 123 complete games while leading the National League in innings three
times and strikeouts four times. Rickey, serving as the team’s president and
general manager, would have had a front row seat to that video game-esque
production.
The inclusion of Dickson
is less obvious. With a career record of 172-181 with a 3.66 ERA in 18 major
league seasons, the small right-hander was the picture of solid mediocrity.
Interestingly, Rickey’s assertion that the pitcher had a tendency to meltdown
in the eighth inning was surprisingly accurate, as his ERA jumped over half a
run from the seventh to the eighth in his career, according to BaseballReference.com.
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