May 9, 2007
Branch Rickey, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman: An Interview with Lee Lowenfish Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:55 PM EST Baseball, and all of America, recently celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major-league debut. When he ran onto the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he became the first African-American to play in the majors since the 1880s. The executive who signed him was Branch Rickey, and just as there is much more to Jackie Robinson than his time with the Dodgers—from his multi-sport stardom at UCLA and his defiance of segregation in the Army to his later career as a businessman and civil rights activist—there is also much more to Branch Rickey than the personnel move for which he remains so justly famous. Lee Lowenfish has spent a decade researching Rickey’s life and times, and the result of his labors has just been published by the University of Nebraska Press as Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. A reading last month at Labyrinth Books, a Columbia University–area store whose stock in trade generally runs more towards Marxism and transgender studies, attracted better than a hundred baseball fans, visibly shocking the occasional granola eater who ventured upstairs in search of Chomsky’s latest treatise on post-colonial semiotics. I recently interviewed the author by e-mail to find out what made Rickey such a towering figure. Leaving aside his signing of Jackie Robinson, what would you say was Branch Rickey’s greatest contribution to baseball? Rickey's greatest contribution, I believe, was in streamlining player development. It was he who first talked about “five tools”: hitting with power, fielding, hitting for average, throwing, and running, perhaps in ascending order of importance. If you had a major-league-capable arm and could run with major-league potential, Rickey felt he and his staff of coaches could teach the rest (except for power). And he always looked for mechanical devices to improve technique, from sliding pits and batting cages to pitching machines and safety batting helmets. Rickey’s phrase “ferocious gentleman,” which appears in your subtitle, sums up his ideal of what an athlete should be. These days it sounds more old-fashioned every day, but was it ever realistic? Did baseball players in the first half of the twentieth century live up to the slogan any more than they do now? Rickey himself was very much a ferocious gentleman. He came out of the nineteenth-century school of “muscular Christianity,” which was not bellicosity for its own sake or in the service of a crusading religion. Rather, it was a “moral equivalent to war,” a term William James coined shortly before his death in 1910. Rickey cited this phrase a lot, and he quoted from a biography of Jesus Christ by Giovanni Papini, a onetime student of James, during his famous first meeting with Jackie Robinson in 1945. Was breeding “ferocious gentlemen” ever realistic in baseball? Not really. Rickey tried to lecture his players from that perch on the dangers of too much drink and carousing, but ballplayers being ballplayers, he had to let certain things slide. As a major-league catcher, Rickey’s greatest strength was his intelligence, and his greatest weakness was that he couldn’t hit (and, later, that his throwing arm was injured). What would you say his greatest strengths and weaknesses were as a field manager, and later as a general manager? As a field manager, Rickey was able to inspire players intermittently with his knowledge of the game and his fierce desire to win, but after a while his intensity made many players too nervous and afraid to make a mistake on the field. During games, Rickey was always pacing up and down in the dugout, showing nervousness himself, and when defeat did come, he was such a picture of dejection that the cumulation of losses began to have an adverse effect on his teams. He didn’t like the way St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon abruptly fired him as manager in May 1925, but he came to realize grudgingly that the front office was the ideal place for his talents. He had his strengths too, of course. Burt Shotton, a fleet outfielder who played for Rickey on the St. Louis Browns in 1913 and became a lifelong supporter, managed under him in Brooklyn for most of 1947–1950. Shotton said that Rickey was the first leader he ever had in baseball who encouraged players to think on their own. Rickey emphasized speed, speed, and more speed—knowing how to run the bases and cutting down on extra bases in the outfield by playing the angles well. The teams that Rickey managed often led the league in errors, but he preached tolerance of “the errors of enthusiasm.” His great strength, once he began working full-time in the front office, was his ability to predict accurately the future success or failure of raw talent. By the late 1930s he had more than 700 farmhands under the St. Louis Cardinals’ control, even after Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had freed nearly a hundred of them in 1938 for being “hidden” in defiance of baseball regulations. It was a measure of their faith in Rickey's methods of training (and the lack of an alternative under the ironclad reserve system of the time) that the vast majority of those freed by Landis returned to the Cardinals’ chain. More often than not, Rickey's adage—“better trade a player a year too early than a year too late”—proved correct. Not always, of course, and I think long-suffering Cubs fans will enjoy learning in my book that ex-Cardinals played a major role in the Cubs’ 1935 pennant and, with Dizzy Dean, the 1938 pennant too. When Rickey came to Brooklyn after the 1942 season, he duplicated his St. Louis success by the same methods—tryout camps for thousands all over the country, even during World War II, and then honing the best in the rapidly growing Dodger farm system. He earned a commission virtually every time he sold a player to another team, but he felt, and I feel, that given the system of the time he was entitled to his riches. Sam Breadon thought otherwise after 1942, ditto Walter O’Malley after 1950, and ditto John Galbreath in Pittsburgh after 1955. What in Rickey’s background led him to become the first major-league GM to sign a black player? How did his fervently held religious views determine his racial attitudes? He was born in 1881 and grew up in southern Ohio near Portsmouth, which is virtually on the Kentucky line. His Wesleyan faith—his very religious parents named him Wesley Branch Rickey—made him sensitive to the issues of slavery and its legacy. John Wesley had condemned slavery in no uncertain terms in 1774. As a great devotee of the Protestant work ethic, Rickey was upset that the aftermath of slavery had led to the creation of a black underclass that wouldn't take a good white Protestant attitude toward work and, if it did want to, had no chance to rise in the world because of racism. These principles were bedrock to Rickey, but he also was a canny baseball businessman who saw great profits and perennial pennant contention from signing Robinson and other black players. He truly admired the dignity and class of Jackie and Rachel Robinson and later Archibald Carey, his colleague on President Eisenhower’s Committee on Government Employment Policy. He remained wary of less educated and less polite black (and white) activists. The only team Rickey did not succeed with was the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he was general manager from the 1951 through 1955 seasons. To what do you attribute his failure—or was he really a success, as can be seen in the Pirates’ 1960 World Championship? In the short run he did indeed fail in Pittsburgh. He inherited a very young team that was even further decimated when the Korean War military draft left him with fewer than two dozen prospects (compared with the several hundred potential players he left in Brooklyn). His one asset was the slugger Ralph Kiner, who was the team’s highest-paid player, its biggest fan attraction, and the kind of one-dimensional player—power was his main asset—that Rickey had never liked. That Kiner was getting involved in the nascent players union at the time didn’t help matters from Rickey’s standpoint. As the team fell and fell in the standings, fans stayed away by the hundreds of thousands, and many of those who did come left after Kiner’s last at-bat regardless of the score (usually the Pirates were trailing). When Kiner was finally traded, in June 1953, his value had sunk because, as with many power hitters, once injuries began to happen, the downslide was quick. Kiner retired after 1955. Rickey himself was kicked upstairs after that season, but in the long view of history (which is the hat as a historian I am proud to wear), his work in Pittsburgh established the nucleus of the 1960 World Series champion. He and his scouts plucked relief ace Roy Face from the Dodger farm system in 1952, the same year he signed shortstop Dick Groat out of Duke. His scouts signed Bill Mazeroski and Bob Skinner, and of course, most famously, they plucked Roberto Clemente out of the Dodger system after 1954. One final word on Rickey. His years as president of the projected Continental League in 1959 and 1960 threw enough of a scare into the established leagues, along with the threat of their antitrust exemption being lifted by Congress, that expansion was approved. Though Rickey was against 10-team leagues because it only increased the number of bad teams in the second division, there is little doubt that his leadership and the big bucks of the planned Continental League owners forced expansion. Rickey even had a chance to run the Mets, but he turned it down because he didn’t want it thought that he had supported a third league only to get a job in the existing leagues.
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