Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online Page A

The agreement was that Rickey and Hedges would stock the team with prospects. At season’s end, they could buy the contracts of as many players as they liked, each for $1,000. This was a small amount of money to pay for seasoned players—too small, one of the team owners said. As this man was operating in the state capital, he leaned heavily to larceny. When Rickey and Hedges discovered they were objects of an attempted robbery, they dropped the arrangement.
    St. Louis at this time had the most inept baseball players gathered in one place since the invention of foul lines. The Browns lost 99 games in one season. Their crosstown rivals, the Cardinals, were worse. Out of carnage like this arises great opportunity. The owner of the Cardinals, Mrs. Helene Britton, stood in her bedroom one night and considered her life. She didn’t want to face the next morning because all her team did was lose. She looked around at her husband, Schuyler Britton. He was in pajamas. She despised him. She despised him worse than she did losing baseball games.
    The following day, Mrs. Britton sent a team of divorce lawyers into court to start proceedings. Later, a second group of lawyers and financial people were told to find a buyer for the Cardinals. She never wanted to see the team or her husband again. It was a parlay that made her life easier.
    Soon the Browns were sold to one Phil Ball, who replaced Rickey as manager not long after Rickey returned from overseas. His baseball career had been interrupted in 1918 by World War I, during which he served as an officer in the 1st Gas Regiment, a chemical-assault unit. Ball’s decision opened the way for Rickey to go across the street to the Cardinals. He ran that franchise for the next seventeen years.
    From the start he went right back to his notion of a farm system. On behalf of the Cardinals, he bought teams all over the country. Year in and out he signed players until he had 650 minor league prospects stocking teams of varying heft from Houston, Texas, to Syracuse, New York, to Topeka, Kansas, and points in between. Creating an army of prospects from which he could replenish the roster of the big-league team, Branch Rickey changed the look of baseball long before he ever heard of Jackie Robinson, so much so that Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s commissioner, became Rickey’s mortal enemy.
    In one ruling, Landis said no player signed by a major league team could be sent to the minors until he had been given a thorough tryout right at the end of spring training. Rickey howled. The rule stayed. There were more such rules inspired by Rickey’s farm system, which was generally known as “The Chain Gang.” Players were bought and sold and assigned to teams without being asked. Not everyone was unhappy about it. The opinion of many sports people was, “These players are being taken out of the gas station and being paid to play. Who are they to complain about anything?”
    Branch Rickey was neither a savior nor a samaritan. He was a baseball man, and nowhere in his religious training did he take a vow of poverty. There came a day in St. Louis that he looked at his famous first baseman, Johnny Mize, who could hit a ball several miles. Mize had led the league in batting and slugging. That he ran quite slowly was a drawback, except the Cardinals had so much speed that the team could accommodate a man with no feet. But then Rickey saw that Mize had developed a new flaw: he had grown an agent.
    â€œJohn loves playing in St. Louis,” the agent said to Rickey. “If he could just get what he deserves.”
    Though the Cardinals might have needed Mize’s bat, Rickey now saw only a player who wanted more money than he was worth. Seeking to jettison Mize, he approached New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham, a restless drunk whom Rickey found sufferable only because whiskey made the man vulnerable.
    â€œJohnny Mize would add glory to the spires of New