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.
