Authors: George Vecsey
Generations of writers, including myself, have charged that Frazee sold Ruth to finance a Broadway musical called
No, No, Nanette.
As Glenn Stout has recently clarified, Frazee sold Ruth in January of 1920, three years before that show was even written. While his dealings with the Red Sox were questionable, Frazee was not destitute, as is sometimes suggested. When he died in 1929, his value was believed to be around $1.5 million.
Still, Frazee's reputation was forever ruined, first by the anti-Semitic insinuations and then by the continued failures of the Red Sox. Bereft of their best players, replenished by fading Yankee rejects, the Sox stumbled through the 1920s and 1930s. They would win four pennants but lost the World Series in 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986, usually under excruciating circumstances.
When the Red Sox took a lead in the 1986 World Series, I took a cue from nervous Boston fans and wrote a column in the
New York Times
(“The Curse of Babe Ruth”) anticipating the horrors that might befall the Sox in the sixth game. Sure enough, Bill Buckner had Mookie Wilson's ground ball trickle between his rickety ankles and the Sox went on to blow the entire Series. In a subsequent book,
The Curse of the Bambino
, Dan Shaughnessy of the
Boston Globe
would present his own cosmic theories about the ongoing spell over the Red Sox. From then on, every time the Red Sox would falter, Harry Frazee would be blamed.
O
n June 28, 1907, a sore-armed third-string catcher with the New York Highlanders allowed the Washington Nationals to steal 13 bases in a single game. This major league record, still standing nearly a century later, is a representative bit of trivia that can be brought up at the ballpark when runners are stealing on some hapless receiver. Impress your neighbors! Share your obscure nugget of information! In a discussion of chicken-winged catchers, come up with the hallowed name of Branch Rickey!
“Rickey threw so poorly to bases that all a man had to do to put through a steal was to start,” the
Washington Post
observed the next day.
Known at first for his college education and observance of the Sabbath, Rickey would play only 119 games in the major leagues, his days as innovator far ahead of him. Yet even then he was preparing for the cerebral side of the game, as opposed to the physical. He was sitting on the bench or spending time in the bullpen, warming up pitchers, but all the time Branch Wesley Rickey was thinking. He would become the forerunner of many hallowed baseball men who could not hit the broad side of a barn with a shovel—managers like Walter Alston, Sparky Anderson, Earl Weaver, and Gene Mauch, who learned the game by observing, via osmosis, through the seat of their pants.
Rickey went beyond managing, becoming baseball's da Vinci, the man who thought of many things. He became the very American face and voice of the game's eternal duality—rural vs. urban, crass vs. pious, corporal vs. mental. A man of the nineteenth century, he was the ancestor of twenty-first-century baseball, which blares patriotic anthems and then bombards the customers' eardrums with commercials.
Long after Rickey's death in 1965, his old players and staff members still referred to him as Mr. Rickey, still recalled his spring training lectures, still employed his theories and techniques, still
quoted him (“addition by subtraction” or “luck is the residue of design”). For that matter, elderly ballplayers still shuddered when they recalled Rickey's cigar-fumed office—known to sportswriters as the Cave of the Winds—and Rickey's bushy eyebrows and jowly cheeks and biblical-driven explanations why he could not possibly spare another hundred dollars on their contract.
The psalm-quoting capitalist permanently changed the game with his inquisitive (and some would say acquisitive) mind, creating the first extensive farm system in the 1920s and hiring the first black major-leaguer of the century, Jackie Robinson, in the 1947 season. Rickey touched the careers of so many immortal players (George Sisler, Stan Musial, Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente) that sometimes it seems nobody could possibly have been in that many places. His rumpled suits and ornate speech provide the ageless American facade of this sport. Nowadays there are thirtysomethings running ball clubs, wearing jeans, strumming guitars, utilizing computers, and more power to them, but the face of the game remains an elderly gent, quoting Socrates or Moses, all the while listening to the turnstiles clang.
Mr. Rickey was not exactly Abe Lincoln, who emerged from a log cabin to become president, but Rickey's life does resonate from another place and time. He was a farm boy from southern Ohio who attended Ohio Wesleyan University and then joined the minor leagues, promising his mother that he would never work on Sunday, to honor their Christian beliefs. Rickey made it to the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns and New York Highlanders from 1905 through 1907, later playing two games back with the Browns in 1914.
His strength would be teaching and scouting, finding better ways to play the game. While still in the minor leagues, he had coached at his old school, Ohio Wesleyan, using football techniques to train his baseball players.
While earning a law degree and coaching at the University of Michigan in 1911, Rickey made the first great discovery of his career, George Sisler, a stylish first baseman who would play 15 seasons and bat .340. In his early days, Sisler twice outpitched the great
Walter (Big Train) Johnson before concentrating on first base. After Sisler retired in 1930, Rickey called him “the greatest player that ever lived,” which may have been an exaggeration—Babe Ruth was both a better hitter and pitcher—but understandably loyal all the same.
By 1913 Rickey was back managing the Browns, initiating new drills in spring training for players who had previously gone from winter sloth to rusty baseball mechanics on the first day of camp. Rickey's camps included handball to improve hand-eye coordination, batting cages, sliding pits, a running track, and daily lectures to reinforce techniques being taught on the field, much as he would do with three other major league teams later in his life.
In 1919 Rickey switched to the Cardinals, then the secondary team in St. Louis. Ahead of his time, as always, Rickey took a control-freak interest in all the details, even the Cardinals' uniforms in 1921, splashing a logo of two redbirds across the chest of the uniforms, an idea he had gotten from a design of a church decoration in St. Louis. He also began the first Knothole Gang, allowing children into games for free, to build a new generation of fans, which the Cardinals sorely needed.
With no money for spring training, the Cards trained at home in chilly Midwestern March. Rickey once had to resort to selling a rug from his own home to meet the bills. “That kind of thing drove me mad,” Rickey once said about the Cardinals' poverty. “I pondered long on it, and finally concluded that, if we were too poor to buy, we would have to raise our own.”
He decided to build a reserve system of minor league players, an idea that went back to Albert Spalding. The minors had essentially remained independent, with clubs developing their own talent and selling it upward to the majors, at prices too high for the Cardinals. In 1919 Rickey began his empire by buying 18 percent of the Houston team in the Texas League, followed by a share of Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the Western Association. He loaded up the teams with the help of talent scouts, including Charlie Barrett, known as “the king of the weeds.”
A national agreement of 1921 forbade major league clubs from
stockpiling players, but some teams got around it by calling it “lending.” In 1922, the United States Supreme Court heard a complaint by the Baltimore team from the upstart Federal League, alleging that the major leagues illegally wielded a reserve clause on players, in restraint of free trade and in violation of the Sherman Act of 1890.
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered an opinion for the unanimous majority that baseball did not constitute interstate commerce. “The business is giving exhibitions of baseball, which are purely state affairs,” wrote Justice Holmes, who added, “Owners produce baseball games as a source of profit, [they] cannot change the character of the games. They are still sport, not trade.''
That opinion would strengthen club owners for more than half a century, handing them legal control of their players, whose only options were to accept the contract offered them or not play at all. By defining baseball as a sport, the Supreme Court had essentially turned it into a national asset. It was bad enough that the general public accepted this pro-business decision, but many players came to believe it, too. They smarted under arbitrary salary limits, but at the same time resisted calls to collective action, as if unionism were a treasonous act against their homeland. A good portion of the sporting press went along with it, too.
Empowered by the Supreme Court's decision, Rickey continued to buy up portions of minor league teams, along with the contracts of hundreds of players. Unsuccessful at managing, Rickey was replaced in 1925 by Rogers Hornsby, the great second baseman. With Rickey concentrating on the front office, the Cardinals won their first pennant in 1926 and beat the Yankees in the World Series, with Grover Cleveland Alexander trekking out of the bullpen to save the seventh game, while he was allegedly hungover. By 1928, the Cardinals had five farm teams, and fifty of their former farmhands were in the major leagues.
Rickey's stockpile soon caught the attention of Judge Landis, who liberated approximately 100 minor-leaguers from their contracts, unleashing the phrase “Rickey's chain gang.” Rickey was unabashed. “He would go to places like South Dakota, North Dakota,
Iowa, and pay a certain figure to every club for the rights to the best player on the roster,” said his grandson, Branch B. Rickey, who in 2005 was the president of the Pacific Coast League.
The Cardinals also won pennants in 1928, 1930, 1931, and 1934, as Rickey constantly reloaded his dynasty with players like the loquacious Jay Hanna (Dizzy) Dean, out of Lucas, Arkansas, who won 58 games in 1934–35. With the Depression gripping the land in the 1930s, Rickey's scouts recruited in areas suffering from poverty and desperation—coming up with Albert (Red) Schoendienst from Germantown, Illinois, who had suffered an eye injury while training in the Civilian Conservation Corps; Stanley Frank Musial, from smogbound Donora, Pennsylvania; Enos Slaughter from Roxboro, North Carolina.
Long after his fabled dash home to win the 1946 World Series, Slaughter reminisced how he had been signed by Wanzer Rickey, the brother of Branch and apparently very much from the same frugal mold. Slaughter said Wanzer had given him a modest signing bonus of a shotgun and two hunting dogs, but the two dogs had run away almost immediately. The funny thing was, Slaughter added, that Dizzy Dean had an identical signing experience with the Cardinals many years earlier. “Me and Diz always wondered if they were the same two dogs,” Slaughter said.
At first, Rickey's empire-building methods were scorned by John J. McGraw, who, for the record, had also scoffed at Babe Ruth's home runs. In turn, the Yankees were slow to build a farm system but on November 12, 1931, Jacob Ruppert purchased the Newark, New Jersey, team just across the Hudson River, and stocked it up with Yankee farmhands. The Yankees managed to have it both ways, rolling through the 1930s by signing young stars like Joe DiMaggio and Tony Lazzeri from strong independent teams in the Pacific Coast League and elsewhere.
Rickey gave the impression of having taken a vow of poverty, but the poverty seemed to apply mostly to his players. By the end of his time with the Cardinals, his salary was said to be $75,000, plus a percentage of the price every time the Cardinals sold a player. Those terms do not sound like much this age when general managers
make multimillion-dollar rock-star salaries, but Rickey's income during the Depression was considerable, particularly for an executive who could quote the Sermon on the Mount to players asking for a raise.
According to legend, Rickey balanced the sacred and the secular, observing the Sabbath while keeping both eyes on the turnstiles. On Sundays he rented a room in the YMCA across from Sports-man's Park, training binoculars on the ticket lines. He preached ethical behavior but his Cardinals were called the Gashouse Gang because of their rough ways. They committed pranks in hotels, played Dixieland on banjos and harmonicas during long train rides, fought with the opposition or amongst themselves—and won pennants.
Shortly after the Cardinals won the pennant in 1942, the Cardinals' owner, Sam Breadon, said he could no longer afford Rickey. Moving on to Brooklyn, Rickey continued to stockpile and train young talent, particularly in spring training. In 1948, the Dodgers bought a former naval air base in Vero Beach, Florida, eventually calling it Dodgertown. Amidst the barracks and diamonds, Rickey was in his glory, personally delivering lectures on subjects like “The Cure Is Sweat” and “Leisure Time Is the Anathema of Youth.” He imposed rules on his players, many of them veterans of combat in World War Two—no cards, no liquor, no cigarettes, frequent weight checks, backed up by refusals of second helpings at the base cafeteria.
He also introduced the first pitching machines plus a contraption of strings, the size of a strike zone, to teach pitchers control without the embarrassment of an umpire, batter, and watchful fans. Many a wild young pitcher, including Sandy Koufax, was taken out behind the barracks to pitch to the strings.
For a religious man, Rickey was something of a conniver, known to leave fake contracts conveniently in view on his desk, intimidating his players by making them think the pay scale was even lower than they had imagined. More than half a century later, Rickey's frugality still rankled Ralph Branca, who had been the Dodgers' best pitcher in 1947. “I won 21 games,” Branca recalled in 2005,
“and I led the league in starts with 36, but he told me I walked too many batters. Yeah, I walked 98—because I pitched 280 innings. I sent the contract back. He was mad at me.”
Rickey's time in Brooklyn came to an end in 1950, when he was pushed out by the new owner, Walter O'Malley. Rickey's teaching methods did not work with the destitute Pirates and he left after 1955. Half a century later, Branch B. Rickey reminisced about the old-fashioned life at the Rickey farm outside Pittsburgh. “We were not country-club,” the grandson said proudly, recalling the pungent odor of the livestock. The center of family life was the Sabbath midday dinner. “I can see my grandfather at the head of the table, anywhere from six to fourteen people,” the grandson said. “He liked to have out-of-towners, make them comfortable. It caused us to have dialogues mixed with social dialogues.”