Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online Page B

York,” he assured Stoneham. In truth, the last thing the Giants needed was an infielder who lumbered. Rickey spoke of the glories of Mize until he had sold the player to Stoneham for $50,000, of which 10 percent went to Rickey. This was above Rickey’s salary of $50,000.
    He got that 10 percent commission on nearly every player he sold, and he sold hundreds of them, for price tags from a few thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. In the records, there are notices of sales for Bob Bowman ($35,000) and Charles Wilson ($59,000) and Nate Andrews ($7,500) and Don Padgett ($35,000), and you could sit there all night totaling these sales figures, with 10 percent off the top for Rickey. He made his biggest sale in 1938, to Chicago chewing-gum maker Phil Wrigley, when he unloaded one of the greatest players he ever managed.
    â€œAnswer me this,” Rickey asked his wife, Jane, one night when he came home for dinner. “Would you say I am somewhat intelligent? Would you say that as a result of Ohio Wesleyan and Michigan Law School that I am fairly well educated? Then why did I exhaust myself for four hours today with a person named Dizzy?”
    Jerome Dean was a big, loose kid who ran out to the mound in the Shawnee, Oklahoma, tryout camp of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was six foot four and it appeared that he might be able to throw fast. This was late in the 1930 season. He would have been there earlier except the Cardinals’ scout for his region, Don Curtis, worked only part-time for the baseball team and full-time with the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, and he was sorry but the rail schedule didn’t allow him time to watch the kid pitch for the San Antonio Power and Light Company and bring him around until now.
    Rickey, with a floppy canvas hat covering him from the sun, leaned forward to get a better look as Dean took the mound. A line of batters, hoping desperately to get the hits that would bring a contract, waited to face him.
    On the mound, Jerome Dean raised his leg and threw. The first pitch was a fastball. He threw eight more to make three outs. Nobody even got a foul tip.
    Rickey spoke quietly. Keep this kid out there for the next three batters. They did. Dean threw nine more strikes and still nobody touched the ball. Rickey’s face and voice revealed nothing. Inside, he was experiencing the sensation that ran through him when he first saw George Sisler pitch and then swing a bat. If he said out loud what he was thinking now, that we are dealing here with a star who looks like he will still be a name in the next century, somebody would tell this kid and the first thing the kid would do is demand a freight car full of money. And Rickey couldn’t have that.
    He signed Dean for money suitable for counting on a candy-store counter and sent him to St. Joseph, Missouri, in the Western League. Dean won twenty-six games and was in St. Louis by the end of the season.
    â€œJust tell the boys to get a couple of runs and I’ll take care of the rest,” he announced. That happened. They let him pitch and in his first major league game he suffered misfortune by allowing three Pirates to get hits. At the hotel late that night he inspected the top paper on a bundle of first editions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . “Damn!” he called out as he saw his picture big and smiling on the first page.
    Rickey leaned on Oliver French, the general manager of the St. Joseph team, to take Dean into his home over the fall and winter. The Frenches found Dean charming but raucous: they had trouble sleeping when he went down in the cellar and threw pieces of coal into the open furnace.
    Dean left the house one day and made his way to Rickey’s office in St. Louis. He needed $150.
    â€œHe didn’t give me any money,” Dean reported of the conversation that followed. “All I got was a lecture on sex.”
    Dean once rented a car and drove it until it ran out of gas in the