The Lords of the Realm, page 7
Then he would wander the grounds, watching players practice on the multiple diamonds of Dodgertown, and work at the very training devices he’d invented—pitching machines, sliding pits, even a hanging rectangle of string that gave pitchers a strike-zone target. The man had endless energy, and aides knew better than to let him take a break. They shook their heads knowingly. Give Mr. Rickey a fifteen-minute rest and he’d go all night.
The story was told in his Cardinals days of the time he spent all day watching 400 minor-leaguers work out in spring training. Then he spent all evening and on into the wee hours evaluating them with his scouts and managers. Finally, at 2:00 A.M., they were finished.
“It’s been a great day, a fantastic day,” Rickey said. “You’ve given me great insights on the players and I want to thank you. Now, does anybody have any questions?”
One of the managers, a man named Willie Duke, spoke up. “I’ve been reading about Russia,” he said. “Can you tell us about communism?” So Rickey talked for an hour about the evils of communism.
Branch Rickey had that kind of godlike authority in baseball. He also had a capacity for moralizing that was striking into a world with few choirboys.
He wouldn’t attend Sunday games, though he would call in for attendance figures. He wouldn’t swear, beyond frequent cries of “Judas Priest!” He wouldn’t countenance beer advertising, which had led to a falling out with Cardinals owner Sam Breadon. He even had a choice moral dictum framed on his wall: “He that will not reason is a bigot. He that cannot reason is a fool. He that dares not reason is a slave.” Rickey would soon put his convictions about bigotry into action, integrating the majors when he called up Jackie Robinson to be a Brooklyn Dodger.
Rickey spoke so fluently in parables and with such thundering moral conviction that it won him a nickname from New York baseball writers: “The Mahatma.” (One of them had read John Gunther’s description of Mahatma Gandhi: “a combination of God, your father and Tammany Hall.” He thought that fit Rickey pretty well.)
Of course, the writers had another nickname for Rickey too: “El Cheapo.” It was easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than a raise out of Branch Rickey. Bill Veeck swore that Rickey had a gimmick in St. Louis—a special foot pedal under his desk. By stepping on it, he would activate a bell that sounded like a telephone’s ring. Some player would come in hell-bent on a raise; the Mahatma’s foot would pump; and the bell would ring.
Then Rickey would pretend to talk with one of his triple-A GMs who was all worked up over a hot new prospect. The prospect invariably played the same position as the player standing before him. Rickey would argue that the phenom needed another year’s seasoning. He’d just barely talk the farm man out of promoting him. Then Rickey would hang up and start talking in apocalyptic terms about the Cardinals’ financial plight. Between that and the player’s pathetic gratitude at having a job—at least for another year—the raise request was abandoned.
The foot pedal may have been apocryphal, but Rickey’s results weren’t. Outfielder Gene Hermanski once sought a big raise after a big season for the Dodgers, and when he came out of Rickey’s office, he was asked whether he got it. “No,” he said, “but at least I didn’t take a pay cut.”
Rickey was a legendary cheapskate in other ways as well. When he ate at Schultz’s, the restaurant below the Dodgers’ office, he left the same tip every time: a nickel. When he went out for a haircut, he brought along a front-office aide, purportedly so they could keep working. When the barber was through, Rickey would open his little leather purse. “Oh, all I’ve got is a fifty-dollar bill,” he said to the aide. “Can you pick this up?”
“He had the same fifty-dollar bill for thirty years,” chuckled Buzzie Bavasi, a frequent victim.
As fervently as Rickey kept money from going out, that’s how he gathered it in. In St. Louis, his contract called for him to keep 10 percent of the proceeds on player sales. With a base salary of $50,000 in the early forties, he cleared more than $80,000 a year. It was an enormous sum at a time when the average player made only $5,000. Rickey insisted on the same deal with Brooklyn, where his base salary was $65,000. He also got a bonus if attendance exceeded 600,000 in a season.
Rickey didn’t care to see himself as a profiteer, of course. He preferred to see himself as an agent of Darwinism. Smoking his Antonio y Cleopatra cigar, crooking a hand to imitate a steam shovel, he would dip it down and explain: “If you scoop up enough talent, you can develop quality out of quantity.” Or: “If you dig up enough rocks, a small percentage of them will become gems.”
Rickey had inherited a decent farm system from MacPhail. Now he would quadruple the scouting budget to create even more quantity. And he would put his son, Branch Jr.—known as “Twig”—in charge of cultivating the minor league talent. The best of it would come up to the Dodgers. The excess talent would be sold for cash, although “talent” was sometimes an overstatement. The Mahatma was unmatched at putting a sheen on mediocre players and selling them as gems. If it came to talking trade, Bill Veeck, a pretty good talker himself, wouldn’t even get in the same room with Rickey. He insisted on passing offers and counteroffers back and forth by note. Phillies owner Bob Carpenter marveled, “With that voice of his, and the way he used the language, he could absolutely hypnotize people.”
Rickey once spent two hours with Carpenter, analyzing his team, position by position. He told him the Phillies were like the painting of a beautiful woman in which her beauty didn’t really show because one of her eyes was sightly cocked. Just retouch that face a little, Rickey purred, and her true beauty will shine through. He said that touch was a slugging first baseman, and he happened to have one.
His name was Howie Schultz, called “Steeple” because of his six-foot-six height. Rickey, the consummate scout, observed that Carpenter had a weakness for slow, strapping lunks—the hapless Phillies were loaded with them. Anybody else could see that Carpenter was overmatched by Rickey. The sixty-five-year-old baseball demigod had won nine pennants and six world championships. The thirty-two-year-old Du Pont heir had won the Delaware State Badminton championship. He bought Steeple Schultz for $75,000.
Steeple Schultz sparked the Phillies to a last-place finish in 1947, hitting .223 with six homers. The next year, he was traded to the Reds, and at season’s end he was released and out of baseball.
John Galbreath, another new owner, was Rickey’s favorite mark. He sold the Pirates more than $2 million worth of marginal players in the 1940s. In one deal alone he shipped five Brooklyn forgettables to Pittsburgh for $300,000 plus outfielder Al Gionfriddo. Why the throw-in? “Rickey needed him,” cracked one wag, “to carry all that gold back to the Dodgers.”
The Dodgers prospered but O’Malley stewed. Rickey, that psalm-singing phoney, was taking a huge salary. (O’Malley maintained that Rickey had signed Jackie Robinson not so much to integrate baseball as to pack Ebbets Field, thus enabling himself to collect his attendance bonus.) Rickey was a spendthrift. (O’Malley blistered him for the heavy investment in Vero Beach. This was before he came to understand the value of Florida real estate.) O’Malley also hated his wasting money on the Beechcraft plane he used to hop cross-country on scouting expeditions.
Rickey was also too good to the players, according to O’Malley. This fault came as news to the players, though they did have a certain affection for Rickey. They could even find some humor in their yearly pay shaftings. The players had an annual talent show at Vero Beach. Chuck Connors, a minor-leaguer who would go on to become a TV actor, once did a hilarious impression of Rickey, concluding with this observation: “There are two things Mr. Rickey loves. One is players, and the other is money. But for some reason, he never lets them get together.”
Rickey and O’Malley also clashed over the emerging medium of TV. The Dodgers were in the first televised World Series in 1947, and this was clearly just the beginning. Rickey hated TV. He thought televised games would keep people away from ballparks. He feared that as games were beamed into America’s backwaters, minor league baseball would suffer. Rickey had ruthlessly exploited the minors, but he loved them, too, as baseball’s training grounds and grass roots.
O’Malley, conversely, embraced TV. He saw baseball as metropolitan entertainment, not small-town sport. He saw TV as one more outlet for baseball to entertain and make money. (Before the final Dodgers–Giants playoff game of 1951, O’Malley spent all night dickering with the networks for TV rights. Bobby Thomson won the game for the Giants with his dramatic home run, “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” while O’Malley pocketed enormous fees for the first TV game seen ‘round the country.)
The fight was, in essence, a conflict between baseball’s past and its future. “To Rickey, baseball remained a civil religion which acted out public functions organized religion was unable to perform,” wrote his biographer, Murray Polner. “O’Malley’s faith rested on balance sheets and dividends.”
Perhaps most of all, Rickey’s country-parson style clashed with O’Malley’s wheeler-dealer ways. Rickey worked all day at the Dodgers’ offices on 215 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. His rival could often be found two blocks away at the Bossert Hotel, where he had converted room 40 into an invitation-only dining and drinking club. There, Walter O’Malley—raconteur, man-about-town, dispenser of box seats—swapped lies, did deals, and made barbed remarks about Rickey. The regulars included George McLaughlin, the politician and banker; Judge Henry Ughetta, another poi; Harry Hickey, an insurance man; and assorted other movers and shakers. Each spring, O’Malley would herd his gang onto a private railroad car for Vero Beach. “He understood what he had with the allure of baseball and he leveraged it,” says Tom Villante, later to be the Dodgers’ TV producer.
There was one other crucial difference between the two men. Rickey had only a five-year contract and no “in” with the Brooklyn Trust Company. He was more vulnerable to ouster. His contract was extended twice, each time by one year, but in 1950 O’Malley succeeded in squeezing him out. Each of the men owned 25 percent of the club, but in their bitter power struggle O’Malley was aided at precisely the right moment by the death, in July 1950, of John Smith, the Pfizer magnate who also held 25 percent of the Dodgers’ stock. The Brooklyn Trust became coexecutor of Smith’s estate, and guess which way the Smith block tilted? Rickey was out.
Not out of work, however, since his great trading partner, John Galbreath, had asked him to be president of the Pirates. But to take that job, he’d have to sell his Dodgers stock. O’Malley offered him $346,667—exactly what he’d paid for it in 1943. Then he settled back comfortably to watch Rickey squirm.
Rickey was in a financial jam. He’d taken a big loss on some other stock he held and had borrowed to the limit on his life insurance. He needed the Pirates job, but to accept it meant selling his Dodgers stock at a rock-bottom price. Though the club’s financial position and prospects were stronger than ever, he saw no chance of selling elsewhere. After all, who would want to be O’Malley’s minority partner? A buyer, wrote one newspaperman, would have “about as much authority in the ball club as the head usher of Ebbets Field.”
Suddenly, however, William Zeckendorf appeared. He was a New York real estate mogul and a friend of John Galbreath. He offered Rickey $1 million. A clause in Rickey’s partnership agreement with O’Malley came into play. If either chose to sell his shares and had a genuine offer before him, the other had the option of buying the stock at the price offered.
O’Malley, with clenched jaw, paid the $1 million and, from that day forward, there was a rule in the Dodger front office: anyone who mentioned Branch Rickey’s name was fined a dollar.
The Dodgers of the early fifties were America’s team as well as Brooklyn’s. The Yankees were baseball’s dominant team, but, as noted sports columnist Red Smith once put it, “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.”
The Brooklyn ball club took the national stage each October, in an elaborately staged morality play costarring the Yankees. They couldn’t quite beat their Bronx rivals, except in 1955, yet they couldn’t help but be more appealing. The Dodgers were magnificent but flawed, athletic but appealing, close but no cigar. Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Don Newcombe, Duke Snider: even before they were immortalized in literature as “The Boys of Summer,” they were emblazoned in America’s consciousness.
In Brooklyn they were worshiped. A Giants fan arguing the merits of Mays versus Snider in Brooklyn was taking his life in his hands. A woman named Hilda Chester led cheers with a cowbell. A ragtag band called “The Sym-phoney” provided the music, along with a highly partisan organist named Gladys Gooding. (She was once ejected from a game for playing “Three Blind Mice” after an umpire’s disputed call.) The partisans regularly filled cozy Ebbets Field.
Long before Walter O’Malley would ever break their hearts, he would show himself as a hard-hearted businessman. In 1953, he decided to fire Red Barber, the announcer who had done so much to build the team’s popularity. O’Malley had two problems with Barber. One, he was an open friend and admirer of Branch Rickey. Two, he made the huge sum of $50,000 a year. A talented young fellow named Vin Scully, who’d been the number-three man on the broadcast crew, and who made a modest $7,500, was elevated to replace Barber.
O’Malley explained it to some aides this way: Imagine a length of pipe that was full of peas, he said. If you squeeze another pea in at one end, a pea is forced out the other. He held the imaginary pipe up. “You put in Vin Scully at $7,500 here, and out there, at the other end, drops Barber at $50,000,” he said. “That, gentlemen, is how you make money!”
The same year, Chuck Dressen managed the Dodgers to their second consecutive pennant. Soon after the 1953 season, his wife, Ruth, took it upon herself to write to O’Malley demanding a three-year contract for her husband.
O’Malley summoned Dressen to his office. He had two problems with the manager. One, he was another Rickey man. Two, he had been offended by Mrs. D.’s letter. Dodger employees actually had secure jobs, by baseball standards, but O’Malley didn’t want to leave any doubt at whose pleasure they served.
“Is what Ruth says what you feel you’ve got to have?” asked O’Malley.
“Yeah,” said Dressen.
“Then I think we should call a press conference for tomorrow morning. The policy here, as you know, Charlie, is one-year contracts. At the press conference we can announce together that you’re leaving.”
“Me and my wife got to have security,” said Dressen.
“Of course,” said O’Malley. “I wouldn’t try to hold you.”
O’Malley called a press conference the next day to announce they hadn’t been able to come to terms. Dressen was moving on.
“I appreciate Charlie’s views,” he told the writers. “Many of his colleagues are getting long-term contracts. However, the Brooklyn club has paid more men not to manage than any other club. The one-year contract is our policy here, and if it weren’t, I’d make it our policy.”
The Dodgers thereupon hired Walter Alston, who, under a succession of one-year contracts, served as manager for twenty-three years. Quiet and pliable, he never expressed any doubt about who was boss.
O’Malley was also moving fast toward “boss” status in another respect. For seven years he’d taken a back seat to Rickey at ownership meetings. But he was, at the same time, becoming influential in the business, partly because he was the rare owner who worked full-time at the business. “His colleagues were hobbyists; he was the CEO of the ball club,” says Peter O’Malley, his son and successor. “People like the Carpenters and the Galbreaths recognized he had studied and researched the issues.”
O’Malley studied and researched his fellow owners just as closely. He knew their net worths, their politics, their peccadillos. “Walter,” Phil Wrigley once said at an ownership meeting, “what do I think?”
It is sometimes said there are only two emotions in business: greed and fear. By knowing each owner’s hot-buttons, by using all the ward-politics savvy he’d picked up from the Bossert Hotel crowd, O’Malley knew how to play them. Irving Rudd, a Dodgers PR man, looked on in awe one day as O’Malley stroked Braves owner Lou Perini by phone. “Looouuuuuu, that’s why you’re so brave and brilliant,” O’Malley cooed, reassuring him on the wisdom of moving from Boston to Milwaukee. “That is why you’re a pioneer.”
O’Malley quickly and skillfully accumulated friends and allies among his fellow owners. It was through them that he floated his ideas and accomplished his objectives. (The Carpenters and Galbreaths were often O’Malley’s front men.) If a motion he instigated via someone else looked certain to pass, he might well vote against it. It gave him splendid deniability and fed his love for using indirect channels.
John Gaherin later would call him The Crocodile. O’Malley might sit in virtual silence for a whole meeting, just twirling his cigar holder, as discussion rambled on. Then, when someone finally advanced a position that approximated his own, he would snap at it like raw meat: “So moved.”
O’Malley also drew people to him and dominated gatherings with humor. He had a vast repertoire of tales and bon mots, punctuated by a Cheshire cat grin. Informed at one meeting that his fly was down, O’Malley waved a hand dismissively. “This concerns me not,” he said, “for a dead bird falleth not from the nest.” (He’d copped the line from Winston Churchill, but was in no danger of being found out in this crowd.)
