Rickey & Robinson (12 page)

I’m forever blowing ballgames
,

Pretty ballgames in the air
.

I come from Chi—

I never try
.

But the gamblers treat us fair
.

Contemporaries said Lardner had a strong and on-key baritone voice. That day his voice and lyric carried far beyond the rattling Pullman car in which he was traveling.

Word of the fix spread and eight White Sox players were indicted, including the iconic Shoeless Joe Jackson, who somehow managed to bat .375 in a Series he was dumping. Thoroughly alarmed, the 16 club owners hastily agreed to form a commission of non-baseball men to
supervise the game and, to be sure, restore public faith in the integrity of baseball. Asked to join the commission, Landis declined. But, he said, he would accept an appointment as the sole commissioner. Frightened, the owners readily agreed.

Further, Landis said, he would have to have unlimited authority to act “in the best interests of baseball.” He would be a one-man arbitration panel.

In virtually a single voice, the owners said, “Yes, Judge.”

And finally, Landis said, the decisions he made could not be appealed.

The owners, actually an arrogant lot, were in trouble and they knew they were in trouble. They submitted to Landis’s autocratic terms without a whimper. This was just about the greatest handoff of power ever until 10 years later when Adolf Hitler took over the German Reichstag.

On August 2, 1921, a hometown jury acquitted the Chicago Eight. The ballplayers and the jurors then joined in a roaring alcoholic celebration. Next day, a cold-sober Landis banned the eight for life. He said that banning them was essential if baseball’s favorable image was to be restored.

Soon sportswriters began calling Landis “Czar” and his reign lasted 24 years, until his death in 1944 at the age of 78. He wanted no funeral, no memorial, no flowers. “He was, I think, an atheist,” wrote J. G. Taylor Spink. Whatever, Landis wanted to be remembered only for his life. It was in many ways an exceptional life, but it was marred and it is marred by racism.

“Certainly in many instances Landis made important decisions that favored baseball’s working men, the ballplayers,” Lester Rodney said at our final meeting. “Certainly with the New Deal and World War II the times were changing. At the
Worker
we prepared petitions to open the game to blacks. More than a million people signed them. Figuratively those petitions were dumped on Landis’s desk. He was
unmoved. The only end to his opposition to blacks in baseball was death. His own death. Within one year of Landis dying, our long campaign bore fruit. Rickey signed Jackie Robinson.”

These intersections of viewpoints are no less than remarkable. The Psalm Singer (Rickey). The Rigid Self-Righteous Judge (Landis). The Brooklyn Communist (Lester Rodney). Jackie Robinson summarized the situation when he testified before Congress on July 18, 1949.

“The fact that it is a Communist who denounced injustice in the courts, police brutality and a lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges. Negroes were stirred up before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the Party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared as well.”

“A profound statement,” I said to him years later.

“For a second baseman,” said Jackie Robinson.

H
Y TURKIN, A SHORT, SLIGHT, BESPECTACLED tabloid sportswriter, was what we used to call a “Figure Filbert.” He was a numbers man, forever considering and reconsidering the statistics and measurements that to some (mostly other numbers men) define baseball. Hy Turkin and Allan Roth, a supremely gifted Canadian statistician whom Branch Rickey brought to Brooklyn, were the founders of modern baseball numerology, subsequently practiced by Leonard Koppett, Bill James and such other numbers folk as John Thorn and Alan Schwarz. But the numbers folk are not universally popular. One day when Koppett arrived in a press box carrying a satchel, the columnist Jimmy Cannon snarled and said, “What you got in that bag, Koppett? Decimal points?”

The numbers were and are such stuff as on-base percentage, at bats per home run, fielding percentage; the arithmetic of baseball fills many volumes. One numeric rule, of particular interest in New York, stated that no outfield fence in a major-league ballpark could be closer to home plate than 250 feet. The thought obviously was to eliminate pop-fly home runs. Officials of the New York Giants maintained that the right-field foul pole in the old Polo Grounds was 257 feet distant.
But so many lazy fly balls reached the seats that numbers of us became suspicious. Hy Turkin was the man who took action. One morning in 1950 he showed up at the Polo Grounds with a yardstick. Turkin crouched at home plate and began measuring as he slouched his way out toward right field. He had just reached first base when three husky ballpark cops appeared and blocked his way. Under orders from the Giant management, they confiscated Turkin’s yardstick and escorted him off the field. There were no laser range finders back in 1950s, so the actual distance to the right-field foul pole at the Polo Grounds remains a mystery, like the identity of Jack the Ripper or the true founder of the city of Rome.

During the 1940s, Turkin crossed paths with a cornet player named S. (for Shirley) C. Thompson who had played in John Sousa’s famous marching band. Thompson was a professional musician, but almost all his spare time was devoted to baseball, its people and its history. In 1951 a sports book publisher, A. S. Barnes, issued the groundbreaking first
Baseball Encyclopedia
. It had been assembled by Thompson and Turkin. The book purported to contain the name of every man who had ever played major-league baseball, the teams for which he played, his positions, his birthplace and birth date and his vital statistics, good (home runs) and bad (errors). Lowell Pratt, the president of Barnes, said the work was so complete that he would personally pay $50 to anyone who came up with the name of a big-league player, living or dead, who was missing from the encyclopedia. (As I remember it, Pratt had to pay off only eight times.)

Rickey made no secret of his aversion to the tabloid press—this would cost him dearly—but the bespectacled little numbers man from the New York
Daily News
interested him and they developed a relationship. Rickey discussed with Turkin, as he did with very few, a bit of the selection process that led to Jackie Robinson.

According to Turkin, Rickey’s first choice was a Cuban infielder named Silvio Garcia. “He hits for power and average,” one of Rickey’s
scouts reported in 1945. “He runs well and his arm is unbelievable. When he’s playing third and throws to first, it’s as if an invisible hand at the pitchers’ mound threw the ball again. That’s how hard this Garcia flings it.”

Walter O’Malley picked up the story from there. “I was the Dodger lawyer,” O’Malley told me years afterward at a luncheon in Los Angeles. “I knew in legal confidentiality about Rickey’s plan to integrate, and of course I approved. He said the scouts had found a superb player named Garcia. He told me to fly to Havana and do a background check. We understood that the first black would have to be a great ballplayer but also a man of character. I’d had some dealings with one of the leading Cuban Jewish families, the Maduros. They were active in a whole lot of areas, from cane sugar to baseball.

“I flew to Havana on a lumbering old DC-3. All the windows were painted black. This was just after the war and the windows were blackened to conceal the plane from anti-aircraft fire from German ships and submarines.

“Roberto Maduro, a good ballplayer in his own right, helped me out. He had a file on Silvio Garcia and it wasn’t pretty. First, Garcia was in trouble with Cuban selective service. It looked as though he might be accused of draft dodging. Second, his personal health records showed that he had been treated for venereal disease.

“I thanked my friend Bobby Maduro, and flew home to New York in another plane with blackened windows. After I reported my findings to Rickey, our search for the right player moved elsewhere.”

Subsequently, in 1949, Garcia signed with the Sherbrooke Athlétiques of the Provincial League in Quebec. This league was “independent,” not affiliated with so-called organized baseball. There, Garcia tore up the turf of Canada. He led the league in homers, doubles and runs batted in. He hit .365. Finally, in 1952, Garcia broke a color barrier in organized ball playing infield for the Miami Beach Flamingos of the Class B Florida International League. But by then time was eroding his great skills.

One thinks of a memorable line Budd Schulberg wrote in another context. Except for bigotry, the now forgotten Silvio Garcia “coulda been a contender.”

Rickey told me he spent “about $30,000" scouting ballplayers around the Caribbean. “That also cost me time and effort,” he said. “In the end it only demonstrated that the best Negro ballplayers for my purpose were playing in the United States.”

My recorded conversation with Rickey that the
Herald Tribune
published in 1954 drew considerable attention. Among those pleased with the story was Rickey himself. “My door is always open for you,” he said afterward, “any time you want to visit for a talk.” Early the next season, in Pittsburgh, I took him up on the offer. I wanted to discuss scouting; I wanted to learn as much as I could about the methodology that led him to Jackie Robinson. He would oblige, but first the man Red Smith called a checkers shark tried an amiable hustle. We were sitting in a private compartment in the low-ceilinged press box at Forbes Field watching a shaky Pirate team play the Dodgers. With Roberto Clemente in right field and Dick Groat at shortstop, these Pirates had potential, but that year there wasn’t a single .300 hitter on the club.

“Wouldn’t it be a fine thing to bring Sid Gordon home,” Rickey began. Gordon was an experienced outfielder with good power, a fine arm and not much running speed. “You know he was born in Brooklyn.” He knew that. I also knew Gordon was Jewish. A Jewish slugger from Brooklyn hitting home runs in Ebbets Field had great box office potential. But I also knew that Gordon was 38 years old.

“I imagine he could have some good days with that short wall out in left field.”

“And right center,” Rickey said. “He still has plenty of power to all fields.” Rickey was hard at work planting a story, which he hoped I would write under a headline about like this:

SID GORDON AVAILABLE FOR RIGHT

OFFER, RICKEY SAYS; VETERAN SLUGGER

WOULD HELP DODGERS WIN PENNANT

That could generate pressure from fans on the Dodger front office and help along a sale that would put a fresh deposit into Rickey’s bankbook. I said I would use a Gordon item in the notes that followed my regular Dodger story. Rickey seemed satisfied. He had made his pitch and if I wasn’t buying all of it, at least I was paying attention. A few weeks later Rickey sold Gordon’s contract to the New York Giants for $40,000. Gordon hit only .243 for the 1955 Giants in what was his final season in the major leagues. (Ten years later he died of a heart attack at the age of 57, stricken while chasing a long fly in a softball game in Central Park. His career total of 202 home runs places Sid Gordon fourth, after Hank Greenberg, Shawn Green and Ryan Braun, among all Jewish-born major-league sluggers, past and present.)

Rickey had profound ideas on the art and science of scouting. Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodger general manager for 17 seasons, told me shortly before his death in 2008, “Without question Mr. Rickey was the greatest scout who ever lived. He is really the father, or grandfather, of modern scouting.”

That day in Pittsburgh, Rickey talked scouting at length. His thought processes were vivid. His phrasing was extraordinary. Almost everything he said was new to me, at least in the way he said it. I didn’t know then that he had made many of the same points many times in closed meetings when he was running the Brooklyn Dodgers. Perhaps that’s why the phrasing was so smooth.

Al Campanis, who succeeded Bavasi as general manager of the Dodgers, tape-recorded Rickey’s dissertations and preserved the cassettes in an old shoe box, which he kept locked in his desk at Dodger Stadium. “The spirit of Branch Rickey still stirs in these offices,”
Campanis said when I was visiting in 1985 with my late son, Roger Laurence Kahn. Campanis peered into his shoe box and considered the labels. Then he read aloud:

“Luck Is the Residue of Design
.

“Is What We Are Doing Worthwhile?

“Intestinal Fortitude
.

“The Cure Is Sweat
.

“Thou Shalt Not Steal (Defensively)
.

“Thou Shalt Steal (Offensively)
.

“Does He Like to Play?”

Lecture titles for a postdoctoral course in the game of baseball.

“Do you have your managers, coaches and scouts listen to these tapes?” I asked.

“Damn right,” Campanis said. “Every year. And I listen to them myself, too, about every six months. Mr. Rickey was the master. He’s still teaching all of us, 35 years after these talks were recorded”—and more than 60 years later as I write these lines.

When we talked scouting Rickey asserted that there were three fundamentals, the arm, the legs and power. “You look at a boy and say, ‘Can he throw?’ Sometimes, particularly with outfielders, you have to watch many games to get an answer. Outfielders can go for a week without having to make an important throw. But this is primarily can he or can’t he. If a boy can’t throw at 18 he won’t throw much at 28. You may tinker a little with grip and mechanics, such as arm angle, but not significantly. Either a prospect has a strong arm, or he doesn’t. Look at the Brooklyn man in right field now [Carl Furillo]. He’s about 30 years old, am I right, and famous throughout baseball for his arm. The base runners take no liberties with him. Well, I’ll guarantee he had the great arm he has today when he was just a prospect, 10 years ago. I’ll guarantee a good scout looking at him then would report, ‘This man is armed.’ Am I going too fast for you?”