In a league of his own

ONE of the most famous photographs in baseball history wasn’t taken on the field. Rather, the setting is a Brooklyn office, 1940s stolid, with pictures hanging in the corner and a window framing wooden Venetian blinds. In the foreground, two men sit at a desk, posing over a contract. One is young and black. The other is white, older, bushy-browed and wearing glasses, and he is pointing to something -- a provision? Where to sign?

The younger man, of course, is Jackie Robinson, who on April 15, 1947, broke the Major League Baseball color barrier as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. With him is Branch Rickey, known in his day as the Mahatma, the president of the Dodgers and the person most responsible for Robinson’s presence in the game.

It was Rickey, after all, who in the early 1940s began scouting black players with the idea of integrating baseball, and it was Rickey who selected Robinson, not just for his playing skills but for his ability to turn the other cheek. As Lee Lowenfish writes in “Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman”: “Branch Rickey sensed in Jackie Robinson everything that he wanted in a race pioneer -- great talent, fierce competitiveness, good personal and family values ... [Dodger scout] Clyde Sukeforth remembered that when Robinson promised Rickey at the end of the interview that he would provoke no racial incident, ‘Well, I thought the old man was going to kiss him.’ ”

“Branch Rickey” is an exhaustive -- and at times exhausting -- biography of this “ardent supporter of capitalism and a foe of left-wing radicalism” who changed the face of America by bringing Robinson to the major leagues. It’s an oddly overdue endeavor; only a couple of Rickey biographies have ever been undertaken (most recently Murray Polner’s 1982 “Branch Rickey: A Biography,” which will be reissued in May in a revised paperback edition), and in recent years, his legacy has dimmed.

Part of the reason has to do with the new society Rickey helped usher into being. Some have “questioned the motives behind Rickey’s trailblazing achievement,” calling him “an overbearing faux emancipator” as if integration were little more than a way to make a buck. Throughout the book, Lowenfish refutes this revisionist misreading, while also arguing that the Robinson signing has overshadowed Rickey’s other contributions to the game.

“As the mastermind of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1917 to 1942,” Lowenfish writes, “Branch Rickey had used his innovative farm system of developing players to turn a financially struggling franchise in the smallest metropolitan area in the National League into a juggernaut that often whipped the rich big-city boys in Chicago and New York.” In the late 1950s, his presidency of the proposed Continental League led to the establishment of four new teams, including the Angels and the New York Mets. For Lowenfish, then, Rickey is an essential figure, “the man who had revolutionized the sport not once but three times.”

Rickey was, to be sure, an unlikely revolutionary. He was a teetotaler and devout Christian who, during his playing and managing days, refused to participate in Sunday games. Born in 1881 in rural Ohio, he was a student athlete at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he began to coach the baseball team while still an undergraduate. It was here, Rickey himself often said, that he first became concerned about racial segregation, when a black Ohio Wesleyan player was not allowed to register at a hotel with the rest of the team. Yet more to the point, his early experiences taught him the value of adaptation, of making the most of a situation, no matter what it was.

Although Rickey wanted to be an attorney -- he finished law school at the University of Michigan in two years -- opportunities were better in baseball, and despite an undistinguished playing career (he hit .239 in 343 lifetime at-bats for the St. Louis Browns and New York Yankees) he was hired in 1913 to run the Browns. Four years later, he moved across town to become president of the Cardinals, an organization so threadbare that one employee “had to supply pads and pencils for the small, barren team office in downtown St. Louis’s Railway Exchange Building and would have to go without a salary check for the first three months on the job.”

Given the high-stakes nature of contemporary baseball, it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of the game’s roots, and Lowenfish deftly etches the frustrations and difficulties of small-market life. At the same time, he reminds us that economic disparity was then, as it is now, a defining problem, exemplified by Rickey’s efforts to hang onto his star player Rogers Hornsby (he succeeded) in the face of attempts by the Chicago Cubs’ free-spending owner Charles Weeghman to steal him away.

It was in response to such economic pressures that Rickey developed the Cardinals’ farm system, which by the late 1930s had “control of more than seven hundred players and interests in over thirty clubs.” This, in turn, helped the Cardinals win nine National League pennants and six World Series from 1926 to 1946. By the end of that run, Rickey had left for Brooklyn, where from 1943 to 1950 he turned the Dodgers into a team that would dominate the National League throughout the ‘50s -- due in no small measure to his pursuit of Robinson and other Negro League stars.

Here too, Lowenfish’s take is detailed and nuanced, balancing the issue of integration with the economic and competitive imperatives of running a professional baseball team. Without question, Rickey was looking for an advantage, and he knew that in the conservative world of big league baseball he would have minority players to himself, at least for a while.

Still, as Lowenfish writes, Rickey’s motivations were complicated, a mix of ambition and fair play. In August 1946, with Robinson already starring for the Dodgers’ triple-A team in Montreal, a committee including the Yankees’ Larry MacPhail and the Cubs’ Phil Wrigley presented a secret report to baseball owners suggesting that integration “could conceivably threaten the value of the Major League franchises” by bringing too many black fans to the park.

Rickey was appalled, and eventually went public about the report in February 1948, telling an audience at Ohio’s historically black Wilberforce University: “I believe that racial extractions and color hues and forms of worship become secondary to what men can do.... The denial of equality of opportunity to qualify for work to any one, anywhere, any time, is ununderstandable to me.”

Where Lowenfish is at his best is in explicating the complex and often contradictory impulses that drove his subject, as well as his almost evangelical sense of self. As he points out, Rickey could be his own worst enemy, haranguing rivals and sportswriters. Despite his successes, he was driven out of St. Louis and Brooklyn, in the latter case by co-owner Walter O’Malley, who used Rickey’s departure to consolidate his power. And Rickey’s involvement in the Continental League, while leading to the expansion of the majors, was not without its difficulties either.

All this leaves us with a question -- or a set of questions -- about who Rickey really was. To Lowenfish’s credit, he doesn’t look for simple answers; despite his own abiding admiration, he never sugarcoats or presents Rickey in anything other than a three-dimensional light. In places, his book shares some of Rickey’s less endearing qualities: a bombastic sense of purpose and a tendency to overemphasize. At the same time, that’s only understandable, for Rickey’s was a complicated life, from his farm-boy background to his self-appointed role as baseball’s moral avatar, a man for whom there was little distinction between the private and the public good.

Ultimately, this is what’s compelling about Rickey -- his embodiment of the intersection of sport and social polity, which reminds us that the games we watch have larger applications, reflecting the society of which they are a part. These days, that means steroid scandals and overblown economics, as baseball mirrors the worst of a corporate culture run amok.’

For Rickey, however, there was something else at stake, a kind of practical idealism, an encouragement of new ideas. As for the measure of his influence, consider this: When the Cardinals beat the Dodgers in a playoff for the 1946 National League pennant, each team celebrated Rickey as its architect. Without him, baseball would not exist as we know it. America would be a different place as well.

In these pages Lowenfish traces the evolution of that America through the filter of a remarkable life. *