Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online

on a big guy. His appearance was evidence of why they should have extensive psychiatric testing for people to whom you allow power. The client in Boise also seems to be the only one in memory. Rickey did not even have a nice old widow to advise.
    He soon wired the Michigan athletic department: “Am starving. Will be back without delay.”
    He returned to Michigan as baseball coach, arriving just in time to interview incoming student-athletes, including one who changed his life. Rickey recounted his first meeting with this young man to his assistant, Arthur Mann:
    Candidates for several varsity baseball teams were reporting for registration, assignment and tryout. Here before me stood a handsome boy of 18 with dark brown hair, serious gray eyes, and good posture. He was about five feet eight or nine, well built but not heavy, and he wore a somewhat battered finger glove on his right hand. He said he pitched on a high school team in Akron, Ohio, and that he was George Sisler, engineering student in the freshman class.
    â€œOh, a freshman,” I said. “Well, this part of the program is only for the varsity.” He showed extreme disappointment. I said, “You can’t play this year, but you can work out with the varsity today.”
    The undergraduate news gathering of The Michigan Daily was at its best in the spring of 1912 when its stringer covering intramural sports was present at a game in which the freshman engineering students played the school’s varsity. The game became famous because of the pitcher for the freshman engineers. The newspaper proclaimed his pitching success under this old-time headline style:
    UNEARTH ‘FIND’ IN INTERCLASS GAME
    Sisler, Freshman Engineer, Twirls for Seven Innings and Strikes Out Twenty Men
    The next time Sisler pitched, students came running from all over campus to watch. When they got to the baseball field, they found Rickey, who plainly did not want to be bothered while he was doing the important work of measuring Sisler’s ability. The more Rickey watched him pitch, the deeper grew his belief that this boy was for the ages. Added to this, Sisler could hit. Rickey admitted later that he almost fainted with excitement. Sisler was still a freshman and ineligible to play on the varsity until his second year. So he was out of Rickey’s hands when he went home for the summer and met with a scout, which was worse than finding a serious girl.
    â€œDid you ever sign anything?” Rickey asked him.
    â€œNo,” said Sisler. “Just some letter saying I’d pitch for this Akron team.”
    â€œDid he pay you?”
    â€œNo, I said I didn’t want money right now. So I didn’t really sign anything.”
    â€œYes, you did,” Rickey said. “A baseball contract.”
    Rickey opened his law books and proclaimed that all of America’s youth would be endangered if such cradle robbing were allowed. “You must not force recognition of this illegal contract,” Rickey told the commissioner of baseball at the time. “If you do this you will forever alienate parents and colleges and even high schools.”
    Before long, Rickey was hired as manager of the St. Louis Browns baseball team. Of course he brought George Sisler along with him. Henrietta Slote of the University of Michigan Law School states today that it is the school’s belief that Branch Rickey’s theft of Sisler “dwarfs the Jackie Robinson business.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Branch Rickey invented the baseball farm system, which gathered players of promise and grew them, like crops, on minor league teams, or farm clubs. The practice was modeled somewhat after the Southern system of slavery, but that was all right because it was baseball and the sport had its own quaint beliefs. It was in Alabama in 1913 that Rickey and the St. Louis Browns owner, Colonel Bob Hedges, got four Montgomery businessmen together and bought the local baseball team.