Rickey & Robinson (22 page)

A curious tempest broke in February 1948, when Ralph Branca, coming off the best season of his career, was negotiating a new contract with Rickey. Branca grew up in suburban Mount Vernon, New York, and one February day the local paper there, the
Daily Argus
, broke a story that Branca had signed a new Dodger contract calling for about $13,000 a year. Dick Young immediately grew furious. He and the mighty
Daily News
had been scooped by the
Daily Argus
. Rickey became just as angry. His policy dictated that signings were to be announced by the ball club office, not by individual players.

Young telephoned Rickey about the
Argus
story. “Not accurate,” Rickey said.

“But I happen to know,” Young said, “that you’ve held private meetings with the kid.”

“Indeed,” Rickey said, “covering a range of issues, all significant.”

By the time Young reached Branca, the young pitcher was insisting he had only talked contract with Rickey, not signed. Young refused to believe him and then wrote in the
News
:

The righteous Mr. Rickey is contributing to the delinquency of a nice young man like Branca by ordering him to lie.

Branca followed instructions by stating that he had not signed, but that he expected to do so when he met Mr. Rickey again.

Young was asserting that two prominent Dodger people, Rickey and Branca, were outright liars. His anger continued to burn and the next day Young wrote:

This morning Ralph Branca will enter the gas chamber for a second exposure to Branch Rickey’s oratorical fumes. This afternoon the Dodger front office will be able to announce that its star right-hander has signed his ’48 contract for something less than $14,000—one of the most miserly documents ever offered a 20-game winner.

Rickey called a press conference that was convened in his office and read aloud much of Young’s story and concluding comments: “Branca, after wiping the blood off his ears, was more than willing to escape with his life.”

Rickey shook his head and said to the assembled press, “That’s supposed to be clever writing, I guess.”

Rickey pressed a button on his intercom. A side door opened and in walked a hulking, hawk-nosed nervous youngster. Ralph Branca.

“Sit down, Branca,” Rickey said. “Have we been holding conversations?”

“Yes, sir.”

“About what?”

“You feel I should get married,” Branca said. “You said if I don’t get married I’ll be nothing more than a matrimonial coward.”

“Correct, Branca,” Rickey said. “Have you signed your 1948 contract?”

“Not yet, Mr. Rickey.”

Rickey pointed a stubby index finger directly at Dick Young. “I demand an apology from you right now and I want one with a retraction in your newspaper tomorrow.” Everyone in the room turned to stare at Young. “I apologize,” the newspaperman said.

Rickey decisively won the skirmish, but knowingly or not he was starting a war. He had made a lifetime enemy of Young.

Dick Young’s cauldron continued bubbling with spleen, although his primary target would change from the Dodger general manager to the Dodger field manager. After Chandler suspended Durocher in 1947, Rickey wanted to replace Leo the Lip with somber, hard-drinking “Marse” Joe McCarthy, who had won four consecutive pennants while running the Yankees. But McCarthy, highly allergic to sportswriters, considered the Brooklyn situation and decided to stay retired in Buffalo, New York. Then Clyde Sukeforth declined the job. Rickey reached back into his past and brought in Burt Shotton, a grumpy 62-year-old baseball veteran whom Rickey had known in St. Louis 40 years earlier. Never afraid of the dramatic, Rickey wired Shotton at his Florida home: “Be in Brooklyn in the morning. Call nobody. See no one.”

Shotton told Rickey that at his age he no longer wanted to climb into uniform. He would manage in street clothes. Under the rules that meant he could not leave the dugout. He could not go face-to-face with umpires, nor, in an on-field blowup, could he rush to Robinson’s aid. Rickey accepted the terms. He announced at a press conference that Shotton “has always been my idea of a number one pilot. I believe he’ll prove to be the greatest manager hereabouts since John McGraw.” This was pure Rickey hyperbole.

Obviously a manager determines the lineup, rotates the pitchers and calls the plays. Less recognized, but just about equally important
is a manager’s handling and, if necessary, pacifying the media. Three of the most successful managers of my experience, Whitey Herzog, Joe Torre and Casey Stengel, were masters of media relations. They knew baseball, of course, but they also formed close, even affectionate relationships with important journalists. Stengel, cold to writers he did not know, became a wonderful dugout host for Red Smith of the
Trib
and Arthur Daley, Smith’s genial but prosaic bookend at the
Times
.

Today baseball rules control the media’s access to clubhouses. Ball clubs set time restraints so that, at least in theory, players can focus their concentration before each game and establish their composure afterwards. The trainers’ quarters are off-limits, on the grounds of privacy. The media is completely barred from players’ private lounges within dressing rooms. Some of the reasoning here is questionable. Ball club officials are manipulative about injuries. Open trainers’ rooms would assist honest reporting. Private lounges? An invention of haughty ballplayers and their haughty union, who would prefer absolutely no dealing with the press. But during the 1940s, particularly in Brooklyn, the clubhouses were open and constantly alive with friends, cousins, visitors, journalists and chirping children. Privacy was not then seen as an issue. Ballplayers were public figures. Leave privacy to dental hygienists and librarians.

Young walked about the Dodger clubhouse with a swagger and when he wanted to interview a player he began by ordering, “Sit down.” Young was short, perhaps five foot six. When asking questions, he preferred to tower over his subject.

His manner annoyed Shotton. Far from courting Young, Shotton tried to ignore him. Young rode the team hard, questioning the courage of certain players and in time informing his readers that Shotton was a fraud. “Behind the phony, grandfatherly manner,” Young wrote, “there lurks a mean old man.” With heavy sarcasm Young began referring to Shotton in the
Daily News
as KOBS, an acronym for Kindly
Old Burt Shotton. If the Dodgers lost, usually it was because of mismanaging by KOBS. If they won, usually it was in spite of KOBS.

Shotton did not get along with Harold Rosenthal of the
Trib
either, and took to addressing him as “Rosenberg.” Rosenthal then told all who would listen, “The son of a bitch is not only mean. He’s an anti-Semite.”

Where was Rickey amid these disruptive events detonating about his ball club? I’m afraid the answer is that for the time being at least, Mr. Rickey was out to lunch.

Finally one late summer day—the specific precipitant is lost to history—a few minutes before game time Burt Shotton exploded on the bench. He stood up in his street clothes and shouted, “I hate you, Young. Everybody on this team hates you, Young. You are barred from our clubhouse.”

“Hey, Dick,” Harold Rosenthal shouted. “I’ll give you my clubhouse notes every day.”

Shotton yelled: “You stay out of this, Rosenberg.”

The entire team sat in silent shock. Then Pee Wee Reese got up and threw an arm around Young’s shoulders. “I don’t hate you, Dick,” Reese said.

Here, in retrospect, was a Rickey mistake. Instead of putting up with Shotton and the veteran’s mangling of Dodgers press relations, it seems to me that Rickey should have dumped KOBS and hired Pee Wee Reese to manage. Reese was smart, humorous, poised, knew the game and had the affection and respect of the entire team and all the sportswriters who were covering the team, including the feral Dick Young.

Was Reese too young to manage? After Bill Veeck appointed the Cleveland shortstop Lou Boudreau as player–manager, the Indians swept to a pennant and won the 1948 World Series from the Boston Braves. Lou Boudreau was all of one year older than Pee Wee Reese.

Not that Rickey was entirely passive. He organized a task force in
the Dodger offices to gather negative information about his tormentors on the
Daily News
. In 1949, Arthur Mann reported, someone, never identified, sent Rickey a copy of a letter Jimmy Powers had written during World War II to an official of the corporation that owned the
News
. The specific suggestion was an allegation that Powers was sympathetic to Adolf Hitler.

“I talked to the captain [publisher Joseph Medill Patterson] last night,” Powers began, “and he told me not to worry over latrine gossip picked up by the FBI, that if Winchell and the rest of the Jews had their way America would be a vast concentration camp from Maine to California. There wouldn’t be enough barbed wire to hold back all the decent Christians maligned by the Jews and those who run with them. In short I was in pretty good company with Col. McCormick [the isolationist publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
], Joe Kennedy [the isolationist father of the future president] and several other decent family men. [Joe Kennedy’s philandering with the actress Gloria Swanson was widely known.] How in hell can I be termed ‘pro-Nazi’ simply because I don’t like certain crackpot politicians and Jews.”

This appalling letter, thought Rickey, the old Michigan Law School graduate, was just what he needed to bring a suit against Powers and the
News
for libel and defamation of character. When Powers’s simmering anti-Semitism came to light, Rickey reasoned, it would surely cost him his job. The El Cheapo slurs would then become history. But the Dodgers’ lawyer advised against litigating. He said, “Laugh it off. A suit will mean that every newspaper turns against you. They hang together like pack rats.” The club lawyer, Walter Francis O’Malley, hardly a disinterested party, was staying up late nights and getting up early mornings, plotting to throw Rickey out of Brooklyn. Then the Big Oom would seize the Dodgers for himself.

Was Byzantium itself ever so byzantine?

I doubt it.

O
NE COULD NOT WORK OR PLAY FOR LONG with Jackie Robinson without hearing him mention the name of Branch Rickey. Robinson’s admiration for his loquacious, heavy-browed benefactor was unqualified and unalloyed to such an extent that it made some observers uncomfortable. Although their association lasted a quarter century, Robinson never addressed or referred to Rickey as “Branch.” It was always and pointedly
Mister
Rickey. Robinson intended this as a dignified expression of respect, but repeated often enough, the word “mister” seemed to suggest subservience, notably to more radical blacks such as Malcolm X. “I’d expect,” Malcolm told me during a telephone interview shortly before he was assassinated in 1965, “that sooner or later Jackie will start calling Rickey ‘Massa.’”

Robinson never used “mister” in referring to anyone else in the generally informal world of baseball. Not to his teammates, not to opponents, not to umpires, nor even to other prominent officials who influenced his career. Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager after Rickey, was simply Buzzie. Ford Frick, who as National League president heroically put down a planned redneck strike against Robinson, was simply Frick.

When Robinson organized the monthly magazine
Our Sports
, which was directed primarily at black fans, he hired me to write articles, suggest story ideas and help him compose a monthly column. It would not take much time, I knew, before Mister Rickey would be the subject of a column. But it surprised me when Robinson in a very inventive way made sure his Rickey piece drew wide attention from the mainstream media.

Robinson telephoned me in January 1953 and asked if I could join him for lunch and a meeting in the Flatiron Building, a venerable, steel-framed skyscraper in lower Manhattan. “It will be worth your while,” he said. “There’s something in it for you.” We had become close during the season of 1952, when Robinson put in a characteristically solid year, batting .309, hitting 19 home runs and making the all-star team at second base. As I’ve indicated, I came to my Dodger assignment predisposed to supporting Robinson because I was supportive of baseball integration.

Jack was innately proud, and after six major-league seasons, he had become increasingly confrontational. He needled umpires. He taunted opponents. He corrected reporters when he thought their stories went off the tracks. These qualities in a white baseball man, say Leo Durocher or Eddie Stanky, drew acceptance and even approval from the general run of reporters, who described both as aggressive fighters. But to most reporters around at the time, these same qualities made Robinson “uppity.” They liked their Negroes docile, subservient and saying if and when they spoke, “Yowsah, boss.” These newspapermen were not robed night riders. They just felt that Negroes should know their place, and remain several paces back of the whites. No mainstream New York newspaper—not one—employed a black sportswriter until the
New York Times
hired Bob Teague in 1959, a full 13 years after Robinson broke into organized ball. All the sportswriters reporting on the Dodgers in the 1950s were white men. Robinson had the keen eyes of a .300 hitter. He noticed.

Among the various estates in which Robinson sought acceptance—playing field, clubhouse and press box—he believed that the press, the fourth estate, was by far the most acutely bigoted. That is one reason why he started his own magazine.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

AN UMPIRE NAMED FRANK Dascoli called a close pitch against Carl Erskine one summer day at Braves Field in Boston. From second base Robinson shouted, “Do the best you can, Dascoli.”

Another close pitch. Ball two. Again, “Do the best you can.” After two more close pitches, the runner walked. “Do the worst you can, Dascoli,” Robinson yelled, his strong tenor carrying toward Bangor, Maine. “We’ve seen your best.”

I laughed. Dascoli threw Robinson out of the game.