Sport: The Old Mahatma

Branch Rickey was born too late to invent baseball, but he has thought up more innovations than anybody else in the history of the game.

One explanation of Rickey’s career may be that husky, ham-handed Branch, who loves the game as much as the clicking of a Saturday-afternoon turnstile, was never a top man in baseball’s ordinary occupations. In his 20s he broke into the majors as a catcher for the Cincinnati Reds, but he was no star—and besides, Pious Methodist Rickey refused to play on Sundays. He tried managing the St. Louis Browns, but he lacked the temperament to field-boss some of his hardbitten pros. He found himself, and became Innovator Rickey, when he put his college (Ohio Wesleyan) brains to work behind a desk.

Turnstiles v. Brain. That was when Rickey took over the job of front-office man for the tail-end St. Louis Cardinals. Rickey and a new owner, the late Sam Breadon, found the club $175,000 in debt. General Manager Rickey tackled the job of putting the club on its feet.

To encourage good will—and future paying customers—he promoted “knothole gang” days and ladies’ days. But his biggest success was in finding and developing player talent; he organized the Cardinal farm system, and reduced “ivory hunting” (i.e., talent scouting) to a business basis. By 1925, the Cardinals had five farm clubs developing major-league players. The next year, the Cardinals won the first pennant St. Louis had ever had.

Rickey’s farm system produced such stars as the Dean brothers, Johnny Mize, Pepper Martin and the rest of the Gashouse Gang, as well as Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial in later days. But the St. Louis turnstiles never clicked as fast as the Rickey brain. He became a master at selling his stars, at the right time, for fabulous prices. He sold a sore-armed Dizzy Dean for $185,000 at the precise moment when Dean was through as a pitcher, unloaded fading, 29-year-old Ducky Medwick for $135,500, and reached into his farm system for 20-year-old Musial.

25% v-$1,000,000. After the 1942 season, Rickey left St. Louis for a potentially greener pasture, Brooklyn. While other clubs, waiting for the stars to return, played wartime baseball with tired old men, Rickey was signing bright young prospects to Brooklyn contracts before Uncle Sam took them away. At war’s end, Rickey had the biggest batch of young baseball talent in the country. In 1947, the Old Mahatma had given Brooklyn its second pennant in 27 years.

By then, the Rickey sieve had dipped into the only pool of baseball talent left untouched, the Negro leagues. No one, perhaps not even Rickey himself, knew whether he was motivated chiefly by social justice or the chance for increased attendance. But when Jackie Robinson donned a Brooklyn uniform in 1947, Rickey had scored another first, paved the way for such other big-league stars as Larry Doby, Sam Jethroe and Don Newcombe.

This year, Rickey’s Dodgers, winners of the 1949 National League pennant, were picked by the experts to run away with the pennant once more. Instead, in second place last week, they were taking the dust of the pennant-bound Phillies. Last week, also, a secret was out. Rickey, always a wise head at selling at the right time, had put his block of Brooklyn stock (25% interest) up for sale. The asking price: something around $1,000,000. The man on the inside track: New York Realtor William Zeckendorf, who specializes in big deals (he gathered up the Manhattan property which John D. Rockefeller Jr. later gave to U.N.).

What was the Old Mahatma up to? One rumor that swiftly went the rounds (though Rickey kept mum): he was bound for Pittsburgh, to start rebuilding that dismal, last-place disappointment. Rickey took his phone off the hook to avoid questions. A “source,” speaking for him as “spokesmen” sometimes speak for U.S. Presidents, announced that, at 69, Rickey wanted to sell out “in order to get a little security in this troubled world.”

That sounded reasonable enough, but hardly anybody in baseball really thought that Branch Rickey was trying to leave the game for good. Baseball rather expected that the Old Mahatma must have another new idea.