October 1964 (5 page)

It would have been hard to find a better human being in baseball at that time, or a man more grounded in all its aspects, than Bing Devine. He was a lifer in the best sense. He had played baseball in college at Washington University of St. Louis, and had been good but not good enough for the professional game, though many times in his long career in the minor leagues, if on occasion a team was short a player, he would dress and place himself on the roster. Devine had learned a lot about trading under Frank Lane, in particular that you could not let one bad trade inhibit you, and that no matter how shrewd and knowledgeable you were, certain trades were not going to work out. At the same time, he understood that you could not trade as an end in itself; you had to have purpose and method to your moves. Devine envisioned a certain kind of baseball team and traded systematically for it. He wanted speed, good defense, and, above all, balance. Speed was important because if your players had it, you not only improved your offense but your defense as well. He differed from most general managers in one important way: he would trade talented pitchers (not, he thought, supertalented ones, but quality ones, fifteen-game winners) for everyday ballplayers. His theory was that pitchers were the easiest players to scout, because a scout was likely to see far more of them on a given day than players at regular positions.

Within months of taking over from Lane, Devine began the process of building the team that would come together in the mid-sixties. His first important decision was
not
to trade a player—a young third baseman-outfielder named Ken Boyer, who had come up through the Cardinal organization. As far as Devine was concerned, Boyer would be the keystone of the next generation. He had played both infield and outfield in his first three seasons, and there were signs that he might be a budding star. He had both power and speed. Several teams coveted him, and Lane had been on the verge of trading him to Pittsburgh, but the trade was stopped. Then the Phillies made a strong offer for Boyer; they offered Richie Ashburn, a talented, speedy center fielder with more range and less power than Boyer, as well as Harvey Haddix, a former Cardinal coming to the end of his prime at thirty-two. Boyer was an adequate center fielder, but Devine suspected that he was out of position there. What distinguished him was not so much his speed as the quickness of his reflexes, a vital trait at third base. Having a third baseman who could field, and who also added power to the lineup, gave a team an edge. So Devine turned down the Phillies: “I’ll bank what little reputation I have that Boyer will be a star, and at third base,” he said at the time.

But that meant Devine went to the winter meetings at Colorado Springs in December 1957 without a center fielder. Day after day passed as the other baseball men made deals and seemed to be improving their teams, and yet Bing Devine, the newest member of this club, had yet to make a deal. He began to think this was something of a black mark against him, especially since his team was not that good. If he had learned anything from Frank Lane, he decided it was not only that you could trade too much but that you could also trade too little. It was part of the culture of baseball that you were supposed to leave those meetings with someone new, so that at the very least the fans would be optimistic about the coming season. On the last night of the meeting, when there was supposed to be a dinner, Gabe Paul of the Reds sought out Devine. “Look, you haven’t made a trade and we haven’t made a trade. Let’s skip the dinner and sit down and make one.” So they met in Gabe Paul’s room, Paul accompanied by Birdie Tebbetts, his manager, and Devine by Fred Hutchinson, his manager at the time. They went back and forth for more than three hours, and late in the session one of the Reds’ officials, buoyed by the fact that they had a number of talented young outfielders coming up in their farm system, including Vada Pinson, suggested trading Curt Flood, a young black outfielder in their minor-league system, to the Cardinals. Flood had the potential to be a great player; he was not yet twenty, he had played two full seasons in the minor leagues, and he had excelled both years. In his first season in the Carolina League, playing under adverse conditions, he had led the league in five categories, including hitting with a .340 batting average. The next year, he had again had a remarkable season, this time with Savannah in the Sally League. Mostly playing third base, he had hit .299 with 14 home runs and 82 runs batted in. Hutchinson had heard of Flood, checked around among his friends, and liked what he had heard: that Flood was a good hitter, a good fielder, better in the outfield than the infield, and a tough kid who had withstood a lot of pressure in a hostile environment. Devine was uneasy because it was his first deal, and because he had not only never seen the player but he had no sense of him either. But Hutch seemed confident of Flood’s ability, and Devine had a good deal of faith in Hutchinson’s ability to judge talent. The Cardinals were offering one undistinguished big-league pitcher and two minor-league pitchers for Flood, and while none of the three was important in the Cardinal plans, if one of them blossomed later, it could be embarrassing. After a lot of palavering, both sides decided to recess. Devine, Hutchinson, and Dick Meyer, who was The Brewery’s man on baseball (because, it turned out, he had once played baseball at a Lutheran seminary), caucused briefly in one bedroom. “Well,” said Meyer, “you’re the baseball people, you make the call.” Devine still felt uneasy about the trade. What saved the moment, Devine thought, was Fred Hutchinson’s decisiveness: “Make the deal. We’ll fit him in somewhere. We think he can hit. We know he can run. Maybe he can play center field for us,” Hutch said.

Bolstered by his manager, Devine made his first deal. The Reds were willing to make the trade, virtually giving Flood away, because they already had Frank Robinson as a budding star in their outfield, where he had hit 67 home runs in his first two seasons, and because Pinson was a potential star in their farm system, having hit .367 with 20 home runs, 20 triples, and 40 doubles with their Visalia team in the California League. Pinson was bigger and stronger than Flood, and Flood himself always suspected they were not enamored of having an outfield of three black players. So Devine left Colorado Springs with two key pieces in place, one by taking a risk and listening to a manager he trusted, and one by
not
making a trade. For their part, the Reds lost the chance to have an outfield of Vada Pinson, Frank Robinson, and Curt Flood.

Slowly and steadily Devine continued to put together the right kind of team. The level of the team’s speed and talent was going up constantly. There was the beginning of the right blend of veteran players and younger players. As the team began to emerge in the early sixties, almost everyone on the team could run, including the two power hitters, Bill White and Boyer. But then, in 1962, there was a dangerous move against Devine. A man named Bob Cobb, who ran the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles, and who had in the days before expansion run Los Angeles’s Triple A club, spent an evening with Busch, and sympathized with the plight of so wealthy a man who was so frustrated by the vagaries of baseball. Cobb suggested that Busch get the greatest baseball man of all time to help run his club, or at the very least to advise him. Who was that? Busch asked. Branch Rickey, of course, Cobb answered, the man who had created the Cardinals’ farm system in their glory years, then had helped create the great Dodger teams of the fifties, and who was most notably revered in baseball history as the man who had signed Jackie Robinson to a Dodger contract and thereby broken the color line.

So it was that fifty-eight years after he first began as a player in St. Louis, fifty years after he first managed a big-league team, and thirty-eight years after he first became general manager of the Cardinals, Branch Rickey returned to St. Louis, principally, it seemed, at the expense of Bing Devine. Rickey joined the organization with the title of Special Consultant to Gussie Busch, and from the start, he set out to take over the team. Rickey was then in his eighties, and his health was beginning to fail. If the world of baseball had changed substantially by the mid-sixties from the one that he had helped create in the thirties and then dominated in the forties and fifties, nonetheless he was still an eminence, and no less ambitious than in the past. Rickey did not think of himself as old (as he had not thought of himself as young when he was young), and he was eager to remain a player in the front office, and to pull off one more miracle. He seemed to have little respect for Bing Devine, whom he remembered from Devine’s days as a lowly clerk, even if most of Devine‘s peers saw him by then as one of the most subtle and skillful front-office men around. From the start Rickey made it clear to Devine that he did not intend to sit on the sidelines as a mere consultant. After their first day in the office together he asked Devine to drive him home. “Why do you think I’m here?” he asked the younger man. “Because Mr. Busch wants your counsel and advice,” Devine said, hoping to put a positive spin on an untenable situation. “That’s not why I’m here,” Rickey said. “I’m here to make the final decisions on this ball club.” Then Rickey asked, “Who do you think is going to run the ball club?” Devine answered that he intended to. “Then we have a problem,” Rickey said. “Indeed I think we do,” said Devine.

Branch Rickey was arguably the single most important front-office figure in modern baseball history. He had helped create the idea of the modern farm organization. By 1949, based on his amazing success in both the Cardinals and the Dodgers, as Jules Tygiel has pointed out in
Baseball’s Great Experiment,
an estimated three out of eight major-leaguers had been developed in one of Rickey’s two farm systems. His courage and foresight in challenging baseball’s policy of segregation, and in sensing Jackie Robinson’s greatness and selecting him as the instrument of his policy, guaranteed him a place in America’s history books. But by reputation, he was, in the words of Leo Durocher, one of the men who managed for him, the worst operator in professional baseball—“the cheapest, the shrewdest, and the most hardhearted of men.”

He was a Victorian man, born in and shaped by another century, much given to bloated rhetoric, at once shrewd and pious, honorable and duplicitous, quick to cover his base moves with high-minded speeches (and, on occasion, his more high-minded moves with primitive explanations). He had promised his mother that he would never play on Sunday and he kept that promise, never, even as an executive, going to the ball park on that day either. Some writers could not decide whether he was the most religious man of his era in baseball or simply the greatest con man. The room where he held press conferences was known by reporters as The Cave of the Winds. At one Rickey press conference John Drebinger of the
New York Times
asked a question and Rickey took off on a twenty-minute soliloquy. “Does that answer your question, John?” he asked at the end. “I’ve forgotten the question,” Drebinger answered. When he talked of his motivation in making a particular move, he often seemed to give the impression that the one person he had consulted was God. “The Mahatma,” the sportswriter Tom Meany called him, a nickname that stuck; it came, of course, from Gandhi. It was the name given the Indian leader by his people, meaning “the great one.” After all, John Gunther, the great journalist of the era, had described Gandhi as “a combination of God, your father, and Tammany Hall.” To the sportswriters of the day that certainly sounded like Branch Rickey. Someone once laid down the basic rules for negotiating with Rickey: “Don’t drink the night before, keep your mouth shut, and your hands in your pocket.”

“El Cheapo,” Jimmy Powers, the sports columnist called him, for his Calvinist view of society clearly forbade paying too much to a player: too much money might corrupt a player, and under no circumstances did Branch Rickey want to corrupt a young man. Better that the money should stay in his own coffers. In fact, the classic Rickey move with a gifted player was to wait until he had reached the apex of his career and his salary was beginning to reach its apex as well, and then trade him for a younger, less expensive but equally talented player on another team. That way he constantly kept the level of talent up, but kept his payroll down in the process. The ability to get something for as little as possible was a trademark of his technique, and even when he signed Robinson, he had not deigned to pay the Kansas City Monarchs anything for Robinson’s contract. He knew that no black baseball official would dare block Robinson’s chances for success in the white baseball world. Certainly, by the custom of the day, Rickey owed the Monarchs something, and had Robinson been a white player from a white team, Rickey would certainly have observed the amenities and paid the team something, even if Robinson had technically not been under contract. As criticism of the Robinson deal mounted within baseball circles, Rickey became quite self-righteous. Black baseball (which was in fact reasonably well organized) was nothing but a “booking agent’s paradise,” he said. “They are not leagues, and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them,” he added.

That Rickey did not recognize the changed world of baseball quickly became clear to Devine and other people in the Cardinal front office. His style of trading was premised on the luxury of an extremely deep farm system that allowed him maximum leverage in all deals, that is, both with other clubs and with his own players. By the late fifties and early sixties that kind of wealth was being swept away by the rising costs of baseball, the rising costs of minor-league teams, and the impact of television, which offered fans in small towns the chance to watch major-league games instead of their local Class B, C, and D games. Rickey’s response to these changes did not seem very realistic to Devine. Aware that the price of players was going up because of the search for bonus babies, he devised an extremely curious new plan for major-league baseball, which he demanded that Devine sell to the other baseball owners. It was a detailed and oddly Utopian plan, which called for the major leagues themselves to draft all the players, and then for the players to be divided up among the existing teams. Devine did not believe in it himself nor did he think it had the slightest chance to be picked up by the other owners and general managers.