Rickey & Robinson (19 page)

I have seen, but have not been permitted either to photocopy or keep, old Dodger financial records, circa 1930, that show weekly payments of as much as $150 from the team to the sportswriters who were covering the ball club. In many instances this exceeded the salary the writers were drawing from their newspapers. This money went not to the journalistic stars: Gallico, Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, all of whom, I believe, would have turned down such payments. Rather it was paid to the so-called “beat” reporters, the men who wrote game stories about the Dodgers more than 150 times a year. Today youthful journalists sometime ask why old-line sportswriters did not punch out tougher stuff. Why didn’t they swarm into clubhouses and write controversial inside stories, covering such matter as the feuds and jealousies that often arose? The answer seems clear. The newspapermen were taking Dodger money not to embarrass or criticize the home team, but to root for it. They came to praise Caesar, not to bury him. The practice of under-the-table payoffs to
sportswriters was widespread throughout the major leagues. The term for the supposedly quiet money was “ice.”

In addition, when I began covering the team, the Dodgers paid travel expenses, meal money, hotel rooms and first-class Pullman berths for reporters from six of the nine metropolitan New York dailies that assigned writers to the team. (The three newspapers that paid their own way were the
Herald Tribune
, the
Times
and the
Daily News
.) The Dodgers maintained a comfortable and free press restaurant and bar tucked near the roof of Ebbets Field behind home plate. As standard policy the Dodgers invited the sportswriters’ wives and children to be their guests in Florida during the six or seven weeks of spring training. No one talked about corrupting the press. Instead the idea was to create a sense that the Dodgers—the players and the management—and the sportswriters were all part of one happy extended family. Only rarely did disharmony appear. Mike Gavin, a portly character from Hearst’s
Journal-American
, liked to sip Napoleon brandy after dinner. He ordered a pony from the Dodgers’ spring-training barkeep, a genial character named Babe Hamberger, then took a Havana cigar, also provided by the Dodgers, and before lighting it dipped the cigar tip into the brandy. “Brings out the flavor of the tobacco,” Gavin said. Then he tossed out the first pony of brandy and ordered a second one to drink. Buzzie Bavasi watched the practice with increasing annoyance. One night he said to me angrily, “Do you think Gavin does that at home?”

Not until 1978 was I able to modify what I perceived as an incestuous culture between ball clubs and the working press. Writing a series of sports columns for the
New York Times
, I mentioned in one the free dining room and saloon that the Yankees maintained for sportswriters amid the catacombs underneath the old stadium. Arthur Gelb, a tall, solemn character who was managing editor, knew a great deal about the life and dramas of Eugene O’Neill, but when it came to sports Gelb was a naïf. He said to me that surely
Times
sportswriters
did not accept free food and drink from the team that they were being paid to cover. I said they surely did. Two things resulted. First, the
Times
henceforth insisted on paying for meals and drinks served to its reporters at the stadium and other ballparks. Second, the
Times
’s lead baseball writer stopped speaking to me.

Despite its pervasive right-wing politics, the
Daily News
took a few populist positions, one of which placed it squarely against the equally pervasive right-wing ways of the baseball Establishment. As far back as February 1933, with Gallico still in charge of the sports section, Jimmy Powers wrote an article headlined: “Colored B. B. Players—O. K.”

This was a full 14 years before Jackie Robinson’s debut at Ebbets Field. Main-lining a resolute stance in favor of integrating the major leagues is the only instance known to mankind where the right-wing
Daily News
and the Communist
Daily Worker
stood shoulder to shoulder and side by side.

Powers’s piece was carefully reasoned. Golf and tennis, he wrote, were country club sports. Bigotry at the clubs came as naturally as snobbishness. But two sports, boxing and baseball, were “born out of the lower class.” Joe Gans, who was black, won the lightweight championship early in the 20th century. The defiant and ultimately tragic Negro Jack “L’il Arthur” Johnson was heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915. Powers mentioned a baseball gathering in 1932 called to honor John J. McGraw, the iconic longtime manager of the New York Giants, whose years were winding down. Powers brought up integration at the function, and the audience of baseball people, which included Branch Rickey, “displayed a refreshing open-mindedness.” Everyone except John McGraw. The aging sage, a native of an all-white central New York village called Truxton, said in a growling tone that Negroes should be content to play in their own leagues.

“But,” Powers wrote, “I believe it is only a question of time before the colored player is admitted into the big leagues. I base this upon the fact that the ballplayer of today is more intelligent—and liberal—than
yesterday’s leather-necked, tobacco-chewing sharpshooter from the crossroads. White college men who have hung up their football cleats or track spikes in the same locker rooms with their colored teammates are not suddenly going to assume the old bias when they enter the runways of the Stadium or Polo Grounds.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

AT THE URGING OF George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, the bank that had held an $800,000 mortgage on Ebbets Field, the Dodgers trustees signed Rickey as club president and general manager in October 1942. Stepping away from baseball to join the struggle against Hitler, the previous president, Larry MacPhail, had enlisted in the Army and drawn the rank of colonel. Under MacPhail the Dodgers had just finished a remarkable but frustrating season. Peopled with such stars as Dolph Camilli, Billy Herman and Dixie Walker, the Dodgers won 104 games, an all-time record for the borough of Kings. But Rickey’s Cardinals, with strong pitching from Mort Cooper and Johnny Beazley and solid performances by Terry Moore, Stan Musial and Enos Slaughter, won 106 and won the pennant. They then defeated the Yankees in the World Series, four games to one. After victories in eight earlier World Series, this was the first time the Yankees had lost one since 1926.

MacPhail was a big winner, a big drinker and a big spender. New York State bank examiners were pressing George McLaughlin on the unproductive Ebbets Field mortgage. In urging Dodger trustees to hire Rickey, McLaughlin, a banker but also a hard-core Brooklyn ball fan, knew he would be getting a great baseball man who, all reports indicated, was as far from being a big spender as anyone in all the front offices in all the cities in the game.

The Dodgers needed Rickey. The Brooklyn Trust Company needed Rickey. The Brooklyn citizenry wanted Rickey. Well aware of
such needs and wants, Rickey negotiated for himself one fabulous contract. The term was five years. The base salary was $90,000, with various bonus arrangements including 15 percent of the proceeds of all player sales to other big-league clubs. He could and did gross over $100,000 a year. (The average annual income for US workers in 1942 was $1,290.)

The magnitude of Rickey’s compensation glitters like gold when matched against the salaries of the stars on his first Brooklyn championship team. Jackie Robinson came up in 1947 and signed for $5,000. Ralph Branca, briefly a pitching ace, was paid $7,000. Center fielder Carl Furillo drew $7,500. Shortstop Pee Wee Reese earned $12,500. While Rickey was banking his $90,000 plus, the collective salary for the entire Dodgers’ starting nine in 1947—the team that would win the National League pennant—came to $87,500. All by himself, Rickey outearned his entire ball club.

Jimmy Powers’s
Daily News
comments were not kind. “When El Cheapo [his new term for Rickey] moved into the gold mine franchise of Brooklyn, a heavily populated boro that is almost the size of Chicago, his payroll was and is disgracefully low.”

Powers presently spoke at a baseball banquet and surprised his listeners by announcing, “I’ve just found out that Skinflint Rickey dislikes money.”

The audience murmured and waited for elaboration.

“The skinflint,” Powers said, “dislikes money in the pockets of other people.”

What a distraction. Under Rickey, Jackie Robinson was integrating baseball and the country. Under Rickey, the greatest of all Brooklyn teams was coming together with Hall of Fame players at shortstop, second base, home plate and in center field. The Boys of Summer had arrived! Yet the most popular paper in New York blew no triumphal trumpets. Blind to both panoramic happenings, the
News
kept its focus tightly on the ledger, even as a dismal bank clerk in a drab setting drawn by Dickens.

I am aware that ballplayers at the time had their struggles. When I was working with Robinson on the magazine
Our Sports
, he told me of a special problem he faced as a $5,000 Dodger rookie: where to live. It was difficult for a middle-class black couple with a baby to find what they considered suitable housing within their means. At the start the Robinsons had to settle for a hotel room in the McAlpin, situated in a commercial district on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. “It was particularly rough on Rachel,” Jackie said. “In that one room she had to deal with diapers and formula and bathe the baby. Whenever we got a breather there always seemed to be some newspaperman knocking on the door.” Though Robinson was becoming a national figure, he spent much of the 1947 season living with his family in a single room. Playing major-league baseball back then generally provided a decent living, but rarely wealth.

The
News
’s sharp but superficial baseball coverage reminded me of its notorious reporting of a Hollywood trial in 1942, when the swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn was accused of rape for having had consensual sex with a pretty 17-year-old named Peggy Satterlee. The trial was appropriately lurid for the tabloid’s passions, particularly when prosecutors asked Satterlee to recount specifics. She testified that while she was in a bedroom on Flynn’s yacht, he took off all her clothes.

“So you were naked?”

“Yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“Mr. Flynn took off his clothes.”

“All of them?”

“He was in a hurry. He didn’t take off his shoes.”

A generation of
News
readers soon was speaking variations on the comic line “Errol Flynn does it with his shoes on.”

Amusing at the time, but the
News
missed a more important, underlying story. Later investigators discovered that people in the
office of the Los Angeles district attorney were accepting payoffs from the big studios to look the other way when stars were caught bedding underage women, driving while drunk and committing other such breaches. After a while the district attorney and his aides demanded a heavy increase in their payoffs. The studio heads refused and as a response the DA elected to go after Errol Flynn. In time a jury, wowed by Flynn’s earthy, masculine glamour, returned a verdict of not guilty.

The
News
never asked
why
Flynn was being prosecuted for casual sex in a Hollywood community where casual sex was the norm. Similarly the
News
didn’t ask
why
Rickey was keeping baseball salaries in Brooklyn so low. When I brought up that question with Rickey one afternoon in his private box at Forbes Field, he told me an intriguing story.

“I recognized that Brooklyn was a great baseball town, but the Dodger franchise seldom achieved its potential,” he began. It was a warm day, but he wore a jacket and tie. Except when he was teaching on a diamond, I don’t recall seeing Rickey moving about in shirtsleeves. “History is a great instructor and the Dodger history was heavy with disappointment. There had been some fine individual ballplayers in Brooklyn. Nap Rucker was as good as any left-hander in his time. Zack Wheat was a first-class hitter. Then there was Babe Herman and Dazzy Vance. Are you familiar with those names?”

“My father started following the Dodgers before 1910,” I said.

“Then those I mentioned were probably gods in your household,” Rickey said. “But baseball is a team game and Dodger teams were too often mediocre. They won pennants in 1916, 1920 and more recently in 1941, but winning three pennants in a half a century is no great accomplishment. It forks no lightning. Worse yet, the Dodger pennant winners were patchwork teams. They were built with good trades or intelligent purchases, but they were not the stuff of dynasty. Under John McGraw the New York Giants were consistent winners. So were the Yankees after they acquired Babe Ruth. Although in a sense
Brooklyn is a world unto itself, it should also be regarded as part of the greater New York area. And in the area, home to three major-league teams, the Dodgers were team number three.

“As I said, they’d had some splendid players. The team had hired able managers, among them Wilbert Robinson and Casey Stengel. What then was the problem? I am a great believer in what I call addition by subtraction. Take away players and managers as problems and what does that leave? The executive branch, what sportswriters call the front office.”

Rickey had done his homework. For many years two families shared control of the Dodgers. The first prominent owner, Charles Ebbets, was an architect who designed Ebbets Field. (He is also said to have been the inventor of the rain check.) When Ebbets needed money to pay construction costs, he sold 50 percent of the team to Ed and Steve McKeever, brothers and partners in a contracting business. The ballpark, considered a wonder when it opened in 1913, occupied an outsized city block, bounded by Bedford Avenue, Montgomery Street, Sullivan Place and McKeever Place. It originally seated about 18,000 people. (Yankee Stadium, opening in the next decade, seated 58,000.)

A heart attack killed Charles Ebbets at the age of 65 in April 1925. He was interred on a cold, wet day in Brooklyn’s imposing Green-Wood Cemetery. Standing at the gravesite during services, Ed McKeever caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia. He died that May. Steve McKeever then assumed the presidency, but subsequently the Ebbets and McKeever families fell to squabbling and litigating. As a result, for many years the Dodgers were essentially leaderless. One glaring consequence came clear in 1937.