Twentieth and last in a season-long series
The baseball heroes of our youth seemed larger than life, even when constrained to a trading card or a television screen. We knew all of their exploits and none of their flaws; those might become evident to us only later in their lives and ours. When I was a boy, the hero was Jackie Robinson, that rare figure undiminished through all the years and all that has been written about him. My boyhood pals who chose Mickey Mantle had, ultimately, to accept his shortcomings and love him still.
My choice for the last profile in the Pioneers series was never anyone’s idea of a hero, although a case could be made. Ruth and Robinson were greater figures in baseball history but innovation followed in their wake; they were not inventors.
Branch Rickey was a baseball genius. He was a general manager for 42 consecutive years, for the Browns, Cardinals, Dodgers, and Pirates. But his wins and losses count for nothing against how much he did to shape the game. He created the farm system, he forced the integration of Major League Baseball, and then he encouraged it to expand west and south by creating a phantom third league. Oh, and in between he may be said to have invented sabermetrics.
He was also a sanctimonious, hypocritical cheapskate, “a man of strange complexities, not to mention downright contradictions,” wrote John Drebinger in The New York Times. He could sign Robinson to a Brooklyn Dodgers contract without compensating the Kansas City Monarchs, trusting they would not stand in the way of integration. He could hold listeners spellbound with the tale of his days at Ohio Wesleyan, when he had to sneak Black player Charles Thomas into his room at a segregated Indiana hotel. But he could also make anti-Catholic remarks or note that a potential Dodgers buyer was “of Jewish extraction and characteristics.” He was erudite and philosophical, charming and devious, earning the sports-page nickname of “Branch Richelieu” (or “The Deacon,” or “The Mahatma,” or “El Cheapo”).
Ohio Wesleyan University, 1904; Branch Rickey (rear, right) and Charles Thomas (rear, center)
His devout Methodism prevented him from playing ball on Sundays, which had hindered his career as a catcher. But on June 28, 1907, the 25-year-old Rickey, behind the bat for the Yankees, let the Washington Senators steal 13 bases, a record to this day. His already tenuous career as a big-league backstop was done.
But then St. Louis beckoned — at first the impecunious Browns, who in 1913 employed him as a combination manager and general manager; and then the bedraggled Cardinals. Rickey served as the Cards field manager from 1919–1925, after which he became the club’s vice-president and business manager. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rickey perfected the farm system, whereby a major league team controlled young, undeveloped players through its chain of minor league franchises. This innovation allowed the Cardinals to compete equally with richer teams in larger cities, generating pennants for the “Gas House Gang” and allowing the team to sell off surplus talent.
“When the Cardinals were fighting for their life in the National League, I found that we were at a disadvantage in obtaining players of merit from the minors,” Rickey said. “Still, I do not feel that the farming system we have established is the result of any inventive genius — it is the result of stark necessity. We did it to meet a question of supply and demand of young ballplayers.” When he was done, the Cardinals farm system included 33 teams. In contrast, each major-league franchise today operates only five or six.
In 1938, however, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis freed at least seventy-four Cardinal farmhands and impugned Rickey’s system for stockpiling good players, denying them a chance to compete at a higher level. His relations with Cards’ owner Sam Breadon were already strained, so Rickey leapt at the opportunity to join the Dodgers.
Since his experience with Charles Thomas at Ohio Wesleyan, Rickey had longed to bring African American players into big-league ball … but he knew St. Louis would not integrate its grandstand, let alone its two ball clubs. Rickey never clearly explained the motivations for this dramatic turnaround once he reached Brooklyn. At times Rickey cited moral considerations, stating, “I couldn’t face my God much longer knowing that His black creatures are held separate and distinct from His white creatures in the game that has given me all I own.” On other occasions, he eschewed the role of “crusader,” proclaiming, “My selfish objective is to win baseball games…. The Negroes will make us winners for years to come.”
Paving the way for “the great experiment,” he announced the formation of the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers to play in a new United States Baseball League and dispatched scouts to search the established Negro Leagues for talent. However, the Brown Dodgers and the USBL were a smokescreen designed to hide Rickey’s real purpose. On August 28, 1945, he brought Monarchs shortstop Jackie Robinson to the Dodger offices on Montague Street in Brooklyn, ostensibly to discuss his possible jump to the Brown Dodgers. Yet on October 23, Robinson signed a Dodgers contract to play with their top farm club, the Montreal Royals of the International League, in 1946.
The rest of that story has often been told, with Robinson the unquestioned hero of a “lone pioneer” legend. In truth, Rickey had intended to sign other Black players to lessen the burden on Jackie, but with an agreement in place to sign him by November 1 and his looming trip to the Caribbean for an exhibition series, a solo signing was Rickey’s only way to proceed (see: https://bit.ly/3REP4JB).
After a brilliant 1946 season in Montreal, Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947 and was an immediate star. Rickey’s Dodgers thus got the jump on the rest of baseball, which was still trying to catch up to his farm-system idea. Brooklyn signed such Black stars as pitcher Don Newcombe, catcher Roy Campanella, pitcher Joe Black, and second baseman Jim “Junior” Gilliam. In 1947–1956 the Dodgers won seven pennants.
Rickey, however, did not last long enough in Brooklyn to enjoy all the flags. Walter O’Malley, one of the Brooklyn partners, led a boardroom coup that forced him out after the 1950 season. Rickey moved on to Pittsburgh, laying the foundation for the 1960 Pirates team that won the World Series. His greatest coup with the Pirates was drafting Roberto Clemente from the Dodgers, who were trying to hide him in the minors by playing him sporadically.
But Rickey resigned from the Pirates at the end of the 1955 season, one year before Robinson’s retirement, and never again had the power to hire him as the game’s first Black manager, a wish his star player had expressed. By then he had embarked upon his next invention: sabermetrics.
Aided by Allan Roth, the Dodgers’ statistician, Rickey published, in Life on August 2, 1954, an article titled “Goodby to Some Old Baseball Ideas.” At the age of 72 he wrote:
Baseball people are generally allergic to new ideas…. I remember that it took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms. I know a manager who still believes that iodine is the panacea for sliding burns. It is the hardest thing in the world to get big league baseball to change anything — even spikes on a new pair of shoes. But they will … eventually. They are bound to.
In this article he proposed a daring formula. “The part of the equation in the first parenthesis stands for a baseball’s team offense. The part in the second parenthesis represents defense. The difference between the two — G, for game or games — represents a team’s efficiency.” What we have here is the first attempt to represent the totality of the game through its statistical component parts.
How did Rickey and Roth come up with the formula? “Only after reverting to bare ABC’s was any progress noted. We knew, of course, that all baseball was divided into two parts — offense and defense. We concluded further that weakness or strength in either of these departments could be measured in terms of runs.” Once mathematicians at M.I.T. confirmed for them that the correlation of team standings with run differential was 96.2 percent accurate over the past twenty years, the task became to identify the component parts of runs.
Rickey’s next and last invention in baseball came in 1958: to form a plan for a third major league. This two-year feint convinced baseball’s owners that they had to expand geographically while returning a National League team to New York. That was the beginning of a sports explosion that presaged the American Football League, the American Basketball Association, and the World Hockey League.
Once the American and National Leagues agreed to expand, Rickey dissolved his “Continental League.” He consulted for the Cardinals after that, to little effect. He died in 1965, just shy of his 84th birthday.
Pioneers: Branch Rickey was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.