SWC75
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BRANCH RICKEY
A good definition of a great man is someone for whom idealism and self-interest dovetail to become one. Idealism gives the great man the power to imaging things as they might be, rather than just the way they are. Self-interest gives them the motivation to overcome the obstacles in the way of changing things. You have to want to do great things and to get credit for them. And it doesn’t hurt if you can benefit in other ways. Another thing about great men is that everything everyone says about them tends to be true to some extent. Their admirers point to their virtues and achievements. Their detractors, (and they will always have them) will point out their faults and failures and suggest that self-interest was behind their achievements - as it surely was.
To many people, (including Ken Burns), Branch Rickey is a sort of saint, who, remembering when a black college teammate was refused service in a hotel, vowed to integrate baseball and finally did so decades later, (long after he’d become a successful general manager). Blacks had fought for this country and they could sure as heck play baseball in it. His detractors, including Walter O’Malley, said that Rickey did it to draw fans to Ebbets Field, where there was a large population of blacks nearby. He wanted to fill the seats and increase his salary by doing so. He also wanted to win and skimming off the cream of black players would help him do so. . I’m sure he did. I think it’s all true.
Ralph Kiner never had anything good to say about Branch Rickey when his name came up during Mets broadcasts. That’s because Rickey never had anything good to say about Ralph. “Kiner has so many weaknesses that if you had eight Ralph Kiners on an American Association team, it would finish last.” Kiner for his part, said that Rickey got bonuses based on how much he reduced the payroll so he was always trying to find ways to lower player salaries- the money went right into his own pocket. DIzzy Dean, who Rickey did trade a decade before, had called Rickey “a skinflint”.
Bill James: “Branch Rickey came to the Pirates as Kiner was at his zenith and immediately stated his intention to trade Kiner for whatever he could get. The Pirate owner, John Gailbreath said “Wait a minute”, and then said “No” and then said “Hell No”. This provoked Rickey, in one of the oddest moves of his career, to begin systematically destroying Kiner’s reputation as a player, so that he could trade him. It’s nuts but that’s what he was doing. Kiner was regarded by some Pirate fans as the second coming of Babe Ruth. Rickey went down a check list, comparing Kiner to Babe Ruth. Kiner didn’t do well. If he could make a player less popular with the fans, Rickey reasoned, he would then be free to trade him.
As it turned out, Rickey was right on the narrow point: Kiner had leg, ankle and back problems, which dramatically shortened his career. Had the Pirates traded him in 1950 or 1951 for a package of three young players, they likely would have come out far ahead in the deal, particularly when you consider that branch Rickey would have bene picking the young players.
On another level, Rickey was saying that if Kiner was really as good as the Pirate fans thought he was, the Pirates wouldn’t have been in last place. This is unfair. Kiner wasn’t Babe Ruth but he was a top-fight player for a few years. No one player was going to keep a team out of last place, year after year, without some contributions from the other 24 guys.”
Rickey was also defending the prerogative of the general manager to have a free hand in building or rebuilding a club, if he was going to be blamed for his success or failure. He’d been given that free hand with the Cardinals and Dodgers with tremendous results. Why should he be limited by the popularity of the best player on a last-place team? The story also shows how selfish and even cruel he could be when someone got in his way. And it shows that he understood that pennants are won by all 25 guys on your roster.
“Baseball’s Hometown Teams” by Bruce Chadwick is a good book about the history of the minor leagues. The first ‘minor’ league was the International Association in 1877, a year after the formation of the National league. It had teams in Canada, New York, Pennsylvania and New England. Other leagues quickly followed. The major league owners didn’t want to slice the pie any more than they had to and they’d created the National League so they didn’t have to schedule games against teams in smaller cities. The minors allowed teams in smaller markets to survive. And the minors served as a root system for the majors, finding local talent, developing it and then selling the contracts of quality players to teams from bigger markets until those players made it to the majors.
Except originally major league teams didn’t wait for minor league teams to put their players on the market. The contacted the players directly and offered them contracts with no compensation for the teams they had been on. This became worse when the American League went major in 1901 the raids became even worse. As a response the minor leagues banded together to form the National Association as a common front against the majors. They put in their own reserve clause into their contracts and threatened lawsuits if the majors continued to tamper with their players.
“The two major leagues, knowing they needed the minors as a talent pool, kicked and screamed. But by the start of the 1903 season they entered into an agreement with the minors that called for payment of up to $7,500 to the minor-league club for any player singed to a major league contract. That agreement plus the success of the new schedules and the reserve clause sent the minor leagues into the twentieth century as the largest and most successful sports organization in America.”
But the minor leagues never considered themselves ‘minor’. At the start of the century, long before the advent of television brought major league baseball to every town in America. The minor leagues were the ‘major’ baseball attraction in their area of the country.” And because they owned the contracts of their players, the minors could keep them the entire year. If a Joe Hauser was on pace to hit 60+ home runs, his team would keep him the whole season and see if he could do it. And the leagues set their own schedules, so the International league could play 168 games and play through the end of September, then have their top four teams play seven game post season series to determine a champion. The PCL could play a 225 game schedule to take advantage of the better weather out west. Then the teams, if they so chose, could sell the contracts of their players, (I hate the term “sell their players”) to a major league team if they chose to. Or not, as in the case of Jack Dunn, whose Orioles won seven straight IL pennants.
In 1919 the National Association, operating from a position of strength, negotiated a new agreement with the majors. “Furious that top players were being taken away for little money pulled out of the agreement in 1919. They resigned it but with a clause permitting them to get whatever they could negotiate in the sale of a player. That meant that in the 1920’s a minor-league owner could keep stars for several years to build up their sale value. This enabled owners like Jack Dunn in Baltimore to put together a dynasty. It also enabled owners to earn substantial extra income, enough to save a franchise or make one prosperous by selling stars…..The majors suddenly found they had to pay at least $50,000 to land a star minor leaguer. They also found owners holding onto players as prices escalated. ” The San Francisco Seals sold Willie Kamm’s contract to the Giants for $75,000 and Jimmie O’Connell to the White Sox for $100,000.Dunn finally sold a frustrated Lefty Grove’s contract to Connie Mack for $100,000.”
Branch Rickey didn’t like operating from a position of weakness. He had come to the Cardinals as their team president and field manager in 1919. There was no such thing as a “General Manager” until Cardinals owner Sam Breadon insisted that he wanted to be the president and that Rickey, after several mediocre teams, quit as field manager. Instead, the new post of general manager was created for him, although he was at first called “business manager”. Anyway, Rickey ran the club. The Cardinals, who hadn’t won anything since the 1880’s, couldn’t afford to spend $50-100,0000 for a player. Instead of trying, Rickey came up for a better use for the money they did have: buying ballclubs. He did so quietly, behind the scenes, so that other big-league teams couldn’t copy him, at least not until his farm system” began producing results. He bought the Syracuse Stars of the international league and part of the Houston Buffalos of the Texas League and the Fort Smith team in the Western Association. (He later moved the Stars to Rochester where they became the Red Wings- and won three straight IL pennants- after Syracuse refused to build him a new ballpark). But Rickey was far from done. He was building an empire.
“By 1931 the Cardinals owned sixteen teams outright. But that was not enough for Rickey- he just kept going. He would buy 100% of a club one month, then 51 percent and controlling interest of another the following month. He collected minor league teams like other people collect coins. Ten, fifteen, twenty and on up. By 1940 the Cardinals owned controlling interest in 33 minor league teams, or one tenth of all the teams in the country. The Cards owned 51 percent of most but a full 100 percent of 15 teams. Rickey soon owned half the Nebraska State league and half the Arkansas-Missouri League. Then he bought the rest of the teams in each league. All told the Cardinals had a farm system of some 500 players from which to choose new talent each year. And not one of them, when moved to the majors, would cost the front office a nickel.”
The Cardinals farm ‘teams’ were not teams at all but simply collections of players whom the Cardinals could promote or demote as it pleased them. Even Little League teams get to keep their players to the end of the season. Instead of being part of a root system, farm clubs are more like an elevator that nobody stays in for long. They no longer really represented the communities they were in, no matter how many games some of the Cardinals teams won.
Judge Landis also looked askance at what Rickey was doing “Along the way, Rickey was not without opposition. Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis represented the most powerful challenge. The objective side of the commissioner viewed the success of the Cardinals as a threat to the integrity of the
game. The controlling side of the man took offense at Rickey’s personal success, particularly when Landis’s salary of $40,000 was almost $10,000 short of Rickey’s. The prevailing side of the Commissioner is subject to debate.” Landis ordered 91 Cardinal farm hands to become free agents, ruling that the Cardinals’ relationship with their minor league teams were illegal.
Bill James: “Landis ruled that the Cardinal contracts had trapped the minor league teams in a relationship in which they were prohibited from taking actions that they might need to take to win a league championship and thus, in effect that they were considered a breach of faith with those team’s fans the same as surrendering the attempt to win the pennant in any other way. Once this breach of faith was complete, once the minor leagues teams were no longer able to pursue victory for themselves only, they could no longer survive without subsidies….The minor leagues decayed because the point was lost that Landis was trying to make: that minor league teams cannot survive if their fans are asked to support units which are, in reality, extensions of a foreign power. The minor leagues before Branch Rickey were a small war. After Branch Rickey, they were boot camp.”
There’s a myth that the minor leagues were dying during the depression and the major leagues rescued them by making them part of their farm systems. It’s a myth largely created by Rickey who alleged that local investors were not able to provide the financial support of a major league franchise. In fact, per Chadwick’s book, the minors prospered in the 30’s, for the same reason the movies did: people needed to be entertained and minor league baseball was a relatively cheap, geographically obtainable form of entertainment available to people all over the country, not just in the big cities. Minor league teams also learned to promote their product with public relations directors, catering to the local press and various promotions, such as Ladies Days, knothole gangs, Old Timer’s games, night baseball, handing out blocks of tickets to local schools, post season playoffs, By the end of the decade there were 43 minor leagues with 350 teams in them. And most of them were still independent teams. The creation of farm systems was not a rescue operation. It was a way of closing down free labor markets so the major league teams had a monopoly.
Other teams caught onto to what the Cardinals were doing and started to copy them and the results showed up in the baseball standings in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
The BRAVES got started with Harrisburg of the NYP League in 1932. They moved to two teams in 1937 and five in 1938, then cut back to one in 1943.
The BROWNS got started with Wichita Falls of the Texas League, (a popular starting point for farm systems), moved up to three teams in 1932 but then retracted to two and then one before moving back out to three in 1936 and thirteen the next year, but then cut it back to one in 1943 and three in 1946.
The RED SOX picked up a couple of teams in 1932 and were up to ten by 1937.
The CUBS also started with Wichita Falls back in the 20’s, then reading in the International league for a couple of years. They really got going in 1934 with 3 teams and 8 by 1938 and 17 by 1948.
The WHITE SOX began in 1932 with Waterloo of the Mississippi Valley League in 1932, had six by 1942 but were up to 14 by 1946.
The REDS started with Cedar Rapids of the Mississippi Valley league in 1932, expanded to six in 1934 and 12 by 1939.
The INDIANS began with Frederick of the Blue Ridge League in 1929, had four teams by 1933 and seventeen by 1939
The TIGERS had some kind of relationship with Ft. Worth of the Texas League as early as 191, (per Baseball Reference. com), but really didn’t get a Rickey-like “farm system” going until 1932, when they had five teams and twelve by 1941.
The DODGERS began in 1932 with Hartford of the Eastern League and Jersey City of the International League. They languished for years with no more than 2-3 teams until Rickey took over and increased that but only to 6-7 teams in the years after the war.
The SENATORS began with Chattanooga of the Southern Association in 1932. They moved up to four in 1936 and ten by 1939.
The YANKEES started in 1932 but started with 5 teams and reached a height of 23 teams by 1949.
The ATHELTICS began IN 1923 WITH Shreveport of the Texas League but abandoned them in 1924 and didn’t get another team until 1932. They didn’t get very heavily into it even after that but did have five teams by 1941.
The PHILLIES got off to a late start with Hazelton of the NYP League in 1934 but they had eight teams by 1940, (Baltimore was their top farm team), and fifteen by 1948, (which produced the 1950 “Whiz Kids”)
The INDIANS started with good ole Wichita falls back in 1920 but didn’t expand to three teams until 1934, ten in 1940, (the Chiefs were their top farm club0 and then to 19 teams in 1948.
The GIANTS started with two teams in 1932, were up to six by 1937 and 21 by 1948.
But the major leagues still didn’t entirely own the minors, who enjoyed another boom in the post-war years. Chadwick: “The players were back from the war and eager to make up for lost time. Recently discharged servicemen jammed as much entertainment into their lives as they could to make up for lost time and that included minor league baseball. ..By the late 1940’s more than forty million Americans were watching minor league games a year…In 1949 there were a record fifty-nine minor leagues, 464 teams and ten thousand players in the Minor Leagues…Attendance was a record 41.8 million.”
What killed the independent minors were three things something Branch Rickey didn’t invent: television, air conditioning and the jet plane. Chadwick: “Television’s Impact was devastating. With so much baseball on television, attendance at minor league parks dropped from a high of 41.8 million in 1949 to 34.5 million in the 1950 season to 27.5 million in 1951 and continued to plunge. The major league teams, of course, greedy for the television dollar, did little to restrict the impact of the enw media on their minor-league affiliates….Television wasn’t the only villain chipping away at the strength of the minors. Manufacturers of air conditioning units were able to refine their technology and increase mass production to sell relatively cheap window units that the average family could afford. People no longer had to seek out air-conditioned theaters or the breeze-swept stands of baseball stadiums to stay cool on hot summer days.”
The earliest Sporting News Baseball Guide I have obtained is the 1955 book, which has the records of the 1954 season. The take-over of the minor leagues by the majors continued to progress and the size of the minor leagues was beginning to shrink due to television, (and air conditioning). 7 of 24 Triple A teams were still independent. Double A had 3 independent teams of 16. The “A” level leagues had 34 teams, 10 of them independent. Class “B” had 44 teams, 20 of them independent. Class “C” had 83 teams, 48 of them independent. Class “D had 68 teams, 17 of them independent. All told, 269 teams, 108 independent and 161 part of farm systems. Most of them were in the lower minors at this point, the places most financially vulnerable.
They jet place allowed the major leagues to switch poorly-supported franchises out of the northeastern quadrant of the country and across the amp all the way to the west coast. (it also allowed them to play one city against others to see how much they would be willing to do to keep or have a team, including building expensive stadiums). “The owners of major league franchises, eager to make as much money as possible, began moving major league teams into markets that had proved successful for the minor leagues”. Milwaukee, Kansas City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Minnesota finally joined the major leagues and the Baltimore Orioles returned. Gone were the original Milwaukee Brewers, the Kansas City Blues, the San Francisco Seals, the Oakland Oaks, the Los Angeles Angels, the Hollywood Stars, the Minneapolis Millers and the Baltimore Orioles of Jack Dunn and Joe Hauser.
People often credit Rickey with making two major changes to the game of baseball: the farm system and integration. Actually he made a third: when the major leagues refused to expand because they didn’t want to share the wealth with anyone, (which prevented the National League from having a New York Franchise), Ricky helped form the Continental League, with himself as President of the League, (one wonders if he invented the league just to give himself a job). When the majors agreed to expand, the CL folded without ever taking the field. But it forced the creation of the New York Mets, the Houston Colt 45s, (Astros), the Washington Senators, (Texas Rangers) and the new Los Angles Angels, as well as all the expansion teams to follow. This ended the era of the “High Minors”, leaving even Triple A to medium-sized cities like Syracuse. If you were a major league town, you likely had a major league baseball team.
In 1963, the majors completed their take-over of the dying minors, getting rid of the low minors and organizing the rest into Triple A, Double A, Single A and the Rookie Leagues, each one a step on a ladder
leading to the major leagues. There has been a movement in recent years to create independent leagues but they are at the lowest level of baseball and are no longer a route to the majors.
Even Rickey’s greatest achievement had a downside. Just as the major league teams didn’t think to compensate teams like the Millers and the Seals for invading their territory, Rickey didn’t consider the Negro Leagues to be part of “Organized Baseball” and there for didn’t consider player’s contracts with Negro League teams to have any validity. So he simply raided those teams for the players he wanted without compensation. The owners of Negro League teams could have fought for their players but breaking the color line was just too important. Eventually, their purpose having ended, (and with the same problems the minor leagues were having drawing fans for the same reasons), the Negro Leagues passed from the scene. Since integration was on an experimental basis throughout the 50’s, (the Red Sox finally became the last team to integrate in 1959), this had the ironic impact of greatly reducing the number of African American professional baseball players to lows that hadn’t been seen since the 19th century.
One wonders if it might have been possible to keep the minor leagues independent and allow them to prosper and the cities they represented have teams that their hometown fans to root for, rather than mere collections of players. Maybe the teams in the high minors could simply have been elevated to the major leagues instead of being put out of business by franchise shifts and expansion teams. Maybe the Negro Leagues could have become part of organized baseball and become part of the minor league system, (they’d tried integrating themselves in the late going: a movie should be made about Eddie Klepp andLouis Clarizio, who integrated the Negro leagues). Maybe the most successful ones, like the Kansas City Monarchs, could have competed as major league teams. Maybe the businessmen who owned these teams could have become major league owners, or at least kept their teams at the minor league level. But it was about taking control of things and they wound up on the wrong side of history.
Rickey, for all his success and fame, was not so revered by those who employed him. Relations with St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon as Breardon insisted on appointing the Cardinal’s field manager and, in Rickey’s view, failed to stand up to Landis when he moved to pare down the Cardinal’s farm system. Beardon was also unhappy that the Cardinals had won no pennants since 1934.Breadon claimed that Rickey was involved in negotiating a possible sale of the Cardinals to an oilman who promised him a bonus of $100,000 if the sale went through. Breadon also tried to reduce Rickey’s salary, which didn’t help their relationship, either. Rickey said “I would rather dig ditches for a few cents an hour than to work for Sam any longer than my contract requires.” He got his wish as Breadon announced in February 1941 that Rickey’s contract would not be renewed when it ran out after the 1942 season. Ironically, Rickey’s farm system had built the next great Cardinals team and they won four pennants and three World Series in the next five years.
Rickey was hired to run the Brooklyn Dodgers, replacing Lee McPhail who was going into the military service. Ray Stockton of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote an unflattering article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “A Brain Comes to Brooklyn”, citing Rickey’s excessive money consciousness , his demand for commissions every time he made a deal, his vanity, (if he didn’t like his picture in the paper, he’d send them a studio shot to use in the future). Stockton did give him grudging admiration as an innovator and an evaluator of talent. Brooklyn sportswriter Tom Meany provided this description of Rickey based on one he’d heard for Mahatma Ghandi: ”an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall and your father”. Rickey was thus dubbed “The Mahatma”. Jimmy Powers of the Daily News had another name for Rickey: “El Cheapo”. It didn’t help that Rickey had traded Brooklyn favorite Dolph Camilli.
Rickey got permission to go ahead with his plan to integrate the game by not simply convincing majority owner Ed McKeever but also banker George McLaughilin of the Brooklyn Trust Company, who had kept the team from going bankrupt during the depression. If you’ve seen the film 42 or any one of many documentaries and books on the subject, you know what happened next.
(To Rickey’s further credit he offered try-outs for the Dodger to Japanese American athletes who were currently interred because of the war. “The fact that these boys are American boys are good enough for the Brooklyn club.” I’m not aware that anything came of this.)
The McKeever family wanted to sell their interest in the team. Banker McLaughlin put together a four man group consisting of himself, Ricky, John L. Smith, the head of the Pfizer Corporation and the team’s chief lawyer, Walter O’Malley, a specialist in foreclosures. One writer said “Instead of being run by the executors of estates, the team was now run by living, breathing people”. Each owned a fourth of the team but Rickey ran it. He and O’Malley came to resent each other. O’Malley particularly thought Rickey took too much credit for integration when he needed the backing of the other owners to proceed with it. He also accused Rickey of pursuing it for his own purposes: to make money and get the pick of black players. Still, iIt seems unlikely that O’Malley would have pushed for integration on his own if he ran the team.
And in 1950, he did. Smith died and O’Malley bought out his shares to gain 50% of the stock in the team. He used that to block anything Rickey wanted to do and then made an offer for Rickey’s shares. Rickey dodged him by offering the shares to a friend, forcing O’Malley to up his price, (to $1,050,000: the Dodgers are now worth $2 billion). Rickey then left for his next job in Pittsburgh and his confrontations with Ralph Kiner and John Galbraith. Eventually he had to retire for health reason but managed to lay the groundwork for the Pirates eventually championship team, including acquiring Roberto Clemente from the Dodger’s organization.
Then came his involvement with the Continental league and a lucrative career as a speaker. In 1965, he was addressing an audience in Columbia Missouri when he told them “I don’t believe I can continue” and collapsed. Those were the last words he ever said, (perhaps the most appropriate “last words” ever spoken). He was 83.
I’m a believer that people don’t so much have virtues and faults as they do traits. If the traits come in handy, they are virtues. If they are problematic, they become faults. In 1926 as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill faced the general strike of that year with defiance and intransigence, even calling for machines guns to be used on the strikers. The result was disastrous and ruined his political career. Thirteen years later he was called back to become Prime Minsters as the Nazis over-ran Europe. He used the same traits to oppose them and rally his countrymen in the effort. They were the same traits and he was the same Churchill. Branch Rickey was an innovator, an opportunist, a skin-flint and a moralist. (His constant lectures and sermons must have really rubbed the people he crossed the wrong way). When his traits produced the integration of the game, its expansion and the success of the teams he worked for, he was a great man. On other occasions, the result was different and so he became less than that. The ledger is in his favor, but it is a ledger.
(Sources: Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman” by Lee Lowenfish, Wikipedia, SABR, Baseball Reference.com, Baseball Alamanc)
A good definition of a great man is someone for whom idealism and self-interest dovetail to become one. Idealism gives the great man the power to imaging things as they might be, rather than just the way they are. Self-interest gives them the motivation to overcome the obstacles in the way of changing things. You have to want to do great things and to get credit for them. And it doesn’t hurt if you can benefit in other ways. Another thing about great men is that everything everyone says about them tends to be true to some extent. Their admirers point to their virtues and achievements. Their detractors, (and they will always have them) will point out their faults and failures and suggest that self-interest was behind their achievements - as it surely was.
To many people, (including Ken Burns), Branch Rickey is a sort of saint, who, remembering when a black college teammate was refused service in a hotel, vowed to integrate baseball and finally did so decades later, (long after he’d become a successful general manager). Blacks had fought for this country and they could sure as heck play baseball in it. His detractors, including Walter O’Malley, said that Rickey did it to draw fans to Ebbets Field, where there was a large population of blacks nearby. He wanted to fill the seats and increase his salary by doing so. He also wanted to win and skimming off the cream of black players would help him do so. . I’m sure he did. I think it’s all true.
Ralph Kiner never had anything good to say about Branch Rickey when his name came up during Mets broadcasts. That’s because Rickey never had anything good to say about Ralph. “Kiner has so many weaknesses that if you had eight Ralph Kiners on an American Association team, it would finish last.” Kiner for his part, said that Rickey got bonuses based on how much he reduced the payroll so he was always trying to find ways to lower player salaries- the money went right into his own pocket. DIzzy Dean, who Rickey did trade a decade before, had called Rickey “a skinflint”.
Bill James: “Branch Rickey came to the Pirates as Kiner was at his zenith and immediately stated his intention to trade Kiner for whatever he could get. The Pirate owner, John Gailbreath said “Wait a minute”, and then said “No” and then said “Hell No”. This provoked Rickey, in one of the oddest moves of his career, to begin systematically destroying Kiner’s reputation as a player, so that he could trade him. It’s nuts but that’s what he was doing. Kiner was regarded by some Pirate fans as the second coming of Babe Ruth. Rickey went down a check list, comparing Kiner to Babe Ruth. Kiner didn’t do well. If he could make a player less popular with the fans, Rickey reasoned, he would then be free to trade him.
As it turned out, Rickey was right on the narrow point: Kiner had leg, ankle and back problems, which dramatically shortened his career. Had the Pirates traded him in 1950 or 1951 for a package of three young players, they likely would have come out far ahead in the deal, particularly when you consider that branch Rickey would have bene picking the young players.
On another level, Rickey was saying that if Kiner was really as good as the Pirate fans thought he was, the Pirates wouldn’t have been in last place. This is unfair. Kiner wasn’t Babe Ruth but he was a top-fight player for a few years. No one player was going to keep a team out of last place, year after year, without some contributions from the other 24 guys.”
Rickey was also defending the prerogative of the general manager to have a free hand in building or rebuilding a club, if he was going to be blamed for his success or failure. He’d been given that free hand with the Cardinals and Dodgers with tremendous results. Why should he be limited by the popularity of the best player on a last-place team? The story also shows how selfish and even cruel he could be when someone got in his way. And it shows that he understood that pennants are won by all 25 guys on your roster.
“Baseball’s Hometown Teams” by Bruce Chadwick is a good book about the history of the minor leagues. The first ‘minor’ league was the International Association in 1877, a year after the formation of the National league. It had teams in Canada, New York, Pennsylvania and New England. Other leagues quickly followed. The major league owners didn’t want to slice the pie any more than they had to and they’d created the National League so they didn’t have to schedule games against teams in smaller cities. The minors allowed teams in smaller markets to survive. And the minors served as a root system for the majors, finding local talent, developing it and then selling the contracts of quality players to teams from bigger markets until those players made it to the majors.
Except originally major league teams didn’t wait for minor league teams to put their players on the market. The contacted the players directly and offered them contracts with no compensation for the teams they had been on. This became worse when the American League went major in 1901 the raids became even worse. As a response the minor leagues banded together to form the National Association as a common front against the majors. They put in their own reserve clause into their contracts and threatened lawsuits if the majors continued to tamper with their players.
“The two major leagues, knowing they needed the minors as a talent pool, kicked and screamed. But by the start of the 1903 season they entered into an agreement with the minors that called for payment of up to $7,500 to the minor-league club for any player singed to a major league contract. That agreement plus the success of the new schedules and the reserve clause sent the minor leagues into the twentieth century as the largest and most successful sports organization in America.”
But the minor leagues never considered themselves ‘minor’. At the start of the century, long before the advent of television brought major league baseball to every town in America. The minor leagues were the ‘major’ baseball attraction in their area of the country.” And because they owned the contracts of their players, the minors could keep them the entire year. If a Joe Hauser was on pace to hit 60+ home runs, his team would keep him the whole season and see if he could do it. And the leagues set their own schedules, so the International league could play 168 games and play through the end of September, then have their top four teams play seven game post season series to determine a champion. The PCL could play a 225 game schedule to take advantage of the better weather out west. Then the teams, if they so chose, could sell the contracts of their players, (I hate the term “sell their players”) to a major league team if they chose to. Or not, as in the case of Jack Dunn, whose Orioles won seven straight IL pennants.
In 1919 the National Association, operating from a position of strength, negotiated a new agreement with the majors. “Furious that top players were being taken away for little money pulled out of the agreement in 1919. They resigned it but with a clause permitting them to get whatever they could negotiate in the sale of a player. That meant that in the 1920’s a minor-league owner could keep stars for several years to build up their sale value. This enabled owners like Jack Dunn in Baltimore to put together a dynasty. It also enabled owners to earn substantial extra income, enough to save a franchise or make one prosperous by selling stars…..The majors suddenly found they had to pay at least $50,000 to land a star minor leaguer. They also found owners holding onto players as prices escalated. ” The San Francisco Seals sold Willie Kamm’s contract to the Giants for $75,000 and Jimmie O’Connell to the White Sox for $100,000.Dunn finally sold a frustrated Lefty Grove’s contract to Connie Mack for $100,000.”
Branch Rickey didn’t like operating from a position of weakness. He had come to the Cardinals as their team president and field manager in 1919. There was no such thing as a “General Manager” until Cardinals owner Sam Breadon insisted that he wanted to be the president and that Rickey, after several mediocre teams, quit as field manager. Instead, the new post of general manager was created for him, although he was at first called “business manager”. Anyway, Rickey ran the club. The Cardinals, who hadn’t won anything since the 1880’s, couldn’t afford to spend $50-100,0000 for a player. Instead of trying, Rickey came up for a better use for the money they did have: buying ballclubs. He did so quietly, behind the scenes, so that other big-league teams couldn’t copy him, at least not until his farm system” began producing results. He bought the Syracuse Stars of the international league and part of the Houston Buffalos of the Texas League and the Fort Smith team in the Western Association. (He later moved the Stars to Rochester where they became the Red Wings- and won three straight IL pennants- after Syracuse refused to build him a new ballpark). But Rickey was far from done. He was building an empire.
“By 1931 the Cardinals owned sixteen teams outright. But that was not enough for Rickey- he just kept going. He would buy 100% of a club one month, then 51 percent and controlling interest of another the following month. He collected minor league teams like other people collect coins. Ten, fifteen, twenty and on up. By 1940 the Cardinals owned controlling interest in 33 minor league teams, or one tenth of all the teams in the country. The Cards owned 51 percent of most but a full 100 percent of 15 teams. Rickey soon owned half the Nebraska State league and half the Arkansas-Missouri League. Then he bought the rest of the teams in each league. All told the Cardinals had a farm system of some 500 players from which to choose new talent each year. And not one of them, when moved to the majors, would cost the front office a nickel.”
The Cardinals farm ‘teams’ were not teams at all but simply collections of players whom the Cardinals could promote or demote as it pleased them. Even Little League teams get to keep their players to the end of the season. Instead of being part of a root system, farm clubs are more like an elevator that nobody stays in for long. They no longer really represented the communities they were in, no matter how many games some of the Cardinals teams won.
Judge Landis also looked askance at what Rickey was doing “Along the way, Rickey was not without opposition. Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis represented the most powerful challenge. The objective side of the commissioner viewed the success of the Cardinals as a threat to the integrity of the
game. The controlling side of the man took offense at Rickey’s personal success, particularly when Landis’s salary of $40,000 was almost $10,000 short of Rickey’s. The prevailing side of the Commissioner is subject to debate.” Landis ordered 91 Cardinal farm hands to become free agents, ruling that the Cardinals’ relationship with their minor league teams were illegal.
Bill James: “Landis ruled that the Cardinal contracts had trapped the minor league teams in a relationship in which they were prohibited from taking actions that they might need to take to win a league championship and thus, in effect that they were considered a breach of faith with those team’s fans the same as surrendering the attempt to win the pennant in any other way. Once this breach of faith was complete, once the minor leagues teams were no longer able to pursue victory for themselves only, they could no longer survive without subsidies….The minor leagues decayed because the point was lost that Landis was trying to make: that minor league teams cannot survive if their fans are asked to support units which are, in reality, extensions of a foreign power. The minor leagues before Branch Rickey were a small war. After Branch Rickey, they were boot camp.”
There’s a myth that the minor leagues were dying during the depression and the major leagues rescued them by making them part of their farm systems. It’s a myth largely created by Rickey who alleged that local investors were not able to provide the financial support of a major league franchise. In fact, per Chadwick’s book, the minors prospered in the 30’s, for the same reason the movies did: people needed to be entertained and minor league baseball was a relatively cheap, geographically obtainable form of entertainment available to people all over the country, not just in the big cities. Minor league teams also learned to promote their product with public relations directors, catering to the local press and various promotions, such as Ladies Days, knothole gangs, Old Timer’s games, night baseball, handing out blocks of tickets to local schools, post season playoffs, By the end of the decade there were 43 minor leagues with 350 teams in them. And most of them were still independent teams. The creation of farm systems was not a rescue operation. It was a way of closing down free labor markets so the major league teams had a monopoly.
Other teams caught onto to what the Cardinals were doing and started to copy them and the results showed up in the baseball standings in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
The BRAVES got started with Harrisburg of the NYP League in 1932. They moved to two teams in 1937 and five in 1938, then cut back to one in 1943.
The BROWNS got started with Wichita Falls of the Texas League, (a popular starting point for farm systems), moved up to three teams in 1932 but then retracted to two and then one before moving back out to three in 1936 and thirteen the next year, but then cut it back to one in 1943 and three in 1946.
The RED SOX picked up a couple of teams in 1932 and were up to ten by 1937.
The CUBS also started with Wichita Falls back in the 20’s, then reading in the International league for a couple of years. They really got going in 1934 with 3 teams and 8 by 1938 and 17 by 1948.
The WHITE SOX began in 1932 with Waterloo of the Mississippi Valley League in 1932, had six by 1942 but were up to 14 by 1946.
The REDS started with Cedar Rapids of the Mississippi Valley league in 1932, expanded to six in 1934 and 12 by 1939.
The INDIANS began with Frederick of the Blue Ridge League in 1929, had four teams by 1933 and seventeen by 1939
The TIGERS had some kind of relationship with Ft. Worth of the Texas League as early as 191, (per Baseball Reference. com), but really didn’t get a Rickey-like “farm system” going until 1932, when they had five teams and twelve by 1941.
The DODGERS began in 1932 with Hartford of the Eastern League and Jersey City of the International League. They languished for years with no more than 2-3 teams until Rickey took over and increased that but only to 6-7 teams in the years after the war.
The SENATORS began with Chattanooga of the Southern Association in 1932. They moved up to four in 1936 and ten by 1939.
The YANKEES started in 1932 but started with 5 teams and reached a height of 23 teams by 1949.
The ATHELTICS began IN 1923 WITH Shreveport of the Texas League but abandoned them in 1924 and didn’t get another team until 1932. They didn’t get very heavily into it even after that but did have five teams by 1941.
The PHILLIES got off to a late start with Hazelton of the NYP League in 1934 but they had eight teams by 1940, (Baltimore was their top farm team), and fifteen by 1948, (which produced the 1950 “Whiz Kids”)
The INDIANS started with good ole Wichita falls back in 1920 but didn’t expand to three teams until 1934, ten in 1940, (the Chiefs were their top farm club0 and then to 19 teams in 1948.
The GIANTS started with two teams in 1932, were up to six by 1937 and 21 by 1948.
But the major leagues still didn’t entirely own the minors, who enjoyed another boom in the post-war years. Chadwick: “The players were back from the war and eager to make up for lost time. Recently discharged servicemen jammed as much entertainment into their lives as they could to make up for lost time and that included minor league baseball. ..By the late 1940’s more than forty million Americans were watching minor league games a year…In 1949 there were a record fifty-nine minor leagues, 464 teams and ten thousand players in the Minor Leagues…Attendance was a record 41.8 million.”
What killed the independent minors were three things something Branch Rickey didn’t invent: television, air conditioning and the jet plane. Chadwick: “Television’s Impact was devastating. With so much baseball on television, attendance at minor league parks dropped from a high of 41.8 million in 1949 to 34.5 million in the 1950 season to 27.5 million in 1951 and continued to plunge. The major league teams, of course, greedy for the television dollar, did little to restrict the impact of the enw media on their minor-league affiliates….Television wasn’t the only villain chipping away at the strength of the minors. Manufacturers of air conditioning units were able to refine their technology and increase mass production to sell relatively cheap window units that the average family could afford. People no longer had to seek out air-conditioned theaters or the breeze-swept stands of baseball stadiums to stay cool on hot summer days.”
The earliest Sporting News Baseball Guide I have obtained is the 1955 book, which has the records of the 1954 season. The take-over of the minor leagues by the majors continued to progress and the size of the minor leagues was beginning to shrink due to television, (and air conditioning). 7 of 24 Triple A teams were still independent. Double A had 3 independent teams of 16. The “A” level leagues had 34 teams, 10 of them independent. Class “B” had 44 teams, 20 of them independent. Class “C” had 83 teams, 48 of them independent. Class “D had 68 teams, 17 of them independent. All told, 269 teams, 108 independent and 161 part of farm systems. Most of them were in the lower minors at this point, the places most financially vulnerable.
They jet place allowed the major leagues to switch poorly-supported franchises out of the northeastern quadrant of the country and across the amp all the way to the west coast. (it also allowed them to play one city against others to see how much they would be willing to do to keep or have a team, including building expensive stadiums). “The owners of major league franchises, eager to make as much money as possible, began moving major league teams into markets that had proved successful for the minor leagues”. Milwaukee, Kansas City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Minnesota finally joined the major leagues and the Baltimore Orioles returned. Gone were the original Milwaukee Brewers, the Kansas City Blues, the San Francisco Seals, the Oakland Oaks, the Los Angeles Angels, the Hollywood Stars, the Minneapolis Millers and the Baltimore Orioles of Jack Dunn and Joe Hauser.
People often credit Rickey with making two major changes to the game of baseball: the farm system and integration. Actually he made a third: when the major leagues refused to expand because they didn’t want to share the wealth with anyone, (which prevented the National League from having a New York Franchise), Ricky helped form the Continental League, with himself as President of the League, (one wonders if he invented the league just to give himself a job). When the majors agreed to expand, the CL folded without ever taking the field. But it forced the creation of the New York Mets, the Houston Colt 45s, (Astros), the Washington Senators, (Texas Rangers) and the new Los Angles Angels, as well as all the expansion teams to follow. This ended the era of the “High Minors”, leaving even Triple A to medium-sized cities like Syracuse. If you were a major league town, you likely had a major league baseball team.
In 1963, the majors completed their take-over of the dying minors, getting rid of the low minors and organizing the rest into Triple A, Double A, Single A and the Rookie Leagues, each one a step on a ladder
leading to the major leagues. There has been a movement in recent years to create independent leagues but they are at the lowest level of baseball and are no longer a route to the majors.
Even Rickey’s greatest achievement had a downside. Just as the major league teams didn’t think to compensate teams like the Millers and the Seals for invading their territory, Rickey didn’t consider the Negro Leagues to be part of “Organized Baseball” and there for didn’t consider player’s contracts with Negro League teams to have any validity. So he simply raided those teams for the players he wanted without compensation. The owners of Negro League teams could have fought for their players but breaking the color line was just too important. Eventually, their purpose having ended, (and with the same problems the minor leagues were having drawing fans for the same reasons), the Negro Leagues passed from the scene. Since integration was on an experimental basis throughout the 50’s, (the Red Sox finally became the last team to integrate in 1959), this had the ironic impact of greatly reducing the number of African American professional baseball players to lows that hadn’t been seen since the 19th century.
One wonders if it might have been possible to keep the minor leagues independent and allow them to prosper and the cities they represented have teams that their hometown fans to root for, rather than mere collections of players. Maybe the teams in the high minors could simply have been elevated to the major leagues instead of being put out of business by franchise shifts and expansion teams. Maybe the Negro Leagues could have become part of organized baseball and become part of the minor league system, (they’d tried integrating themselves in the late going: a movie should be made about Eddie Klepp andLouis Clarizio, who integrated the Negro leagues). Maybe the most successful ones, like the Kansas City Monarchs, could have competed as major league teams. Maybe the businessmen who owned these teams could have become major league owners, or at least kept their teams at the minor league level. But it was about taking control of things and they wound up on the wrong side of history.
Rickey, for all his success and fame, was not so revered by those who employed him. Relations with St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon as Breardon insisted on appointing the Cardinal’s field manager and, in Rickey’s view, failed to stand up to Landis when he moved to pare down the Cardinal’s farm system. Beardon was also unhappy that the Cardinals had won no pennants since 1934.Breadon claimed that Rickey was involved in negotiating a possible sale of the Cardinals to an oilman who promised him a bonus of $100,000 if the sale went through. Breadon also tried to reduce Rickey’s salary, which didn’t help their relationship, either. Rickey said “I would rather dig ditches for a few cents an hour than to work for Sam any longer than my contract requires.” He got his wish as Breadon announced in February 1941 that Rickey’s contract would not be renewed when it ran out after the 1942 season. Ironically, Rickey’s farm system had built the next great Cardinals team and they won four pennants and three World Series in the next five years.
Rickey was hired to run the Brooklyn Dodgers, replacing Lee McPhail who was going into the military service. Ray Stockton of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote an unflattering article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “A Brain Comes to Brooklyn”, citing Rickey’s excessive money consciousness , his demand for commissions every time he made a deal, his vanity, (if he didn’t like his picture in the paper, he’d send them a studio shot to use in the future). Stockton did give him grudging admiration as an innovator and an evaluator of talent. Brooklyn sportswriter Tom Meany provided this description of Rickey based on one he’d heard for Mahatma Ghandi: ”an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall and your father”. Rickey was thus dubbed “The Mahatma”. Jimmy Powers of the Daily News had another name for Rickey: “El Cheapo”. It didn’t help that Rickey had traded Brooklyn favorite Dolph Camilli.
Rickey got permission to go ahead with his plan to integrate the game by not simply convincing majority owner Ed McKeever but also banker George McLaughilin of the Brooklyn Trust Company, who had kept the team from going bankrupt during the depression. If you’ve seen the film 42 or any one of many documentaries and books on the subject, you know what happened next.
(To Rickey’s further credit he offered try-outs for the Dodger to Japanese American athletes who were currently interred because of the war. “The fact that these boys are American boys are good enough for the Brooklyn club.” I’m not aware that anything came of this.)
The McKeever family wanted to sell their interest in the team. Banker McLaughlin put together a four man group consisting of himself, Ricky, John L. Smith, the head of the Pfizer Corporation and the team’s chief lawyer, Walter O’Malley, a specialist in foreclosures. One writer said “Instead of being run by the executors of estates, the team was now run by living, breathing people”. Each owned a fourth of the team but Rickey ran it. He and O’Malley came to resent each other. O’Malley particularly thought Rickey took too much credit for integration when he needed the backing of the other owners to proceed with it. He also accused Rickey of pursuing it for his own purposes: to make money and get the pick of black players. Still, iIt seems unlikely that O’Malley would have pushed for integration on his own if he ran the team.
And in 1950, he did. Smith died and O’Malley bought out his shares to gain 50% of the stock in the team. He used that to block anything Rickey wanted to do and then made an offer for Rickey’s shares. Rickey dodged him by offering the shares to a friend, forcing O’Malley to up his price, (to $1,050,000: the Dodgers are now worth $2 billion). Rickey then left for his next job in Pittsburgh and his confrontations with Ralph Kiner and John Galbraith. Eventually he had to retire for health reason but managed to lay the groundwork for the Pirates eventually championship team, including acquiring Roberto Clemente from the Dodger’s organization.
Then came his involvement with the Continental league and a lucrative career as a speaker. In 1965, he was addressing an audience in Columbia Missouri when he told them “I don’t believe I can continue” and collapsed. Those were the last words he ever said, (perhaps the most appropriate “last words” ever spoken). He was 83.
I’m a believer that people don’t so much have virtues and faults as they do traits. If the traits come in handy, they are virtues. If they are problematic, they become faults. In 1926 as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill faced the general strike of that year with defiance and intransigence, even calling for machines guns to be used on the strikers. The result was disastrous and ruined his political career. Thirteen years later he was called back to become Prime Minsters as the Nazis over-ran Europe. He used the same traits to oppose them and rally his countrymen in the effort. They were the same traits and he was the same Churchill. Branch Rickey was an innovator, an opportunist, a skin-flint and a moralist. (His constant lectures and sermons must have really rubbed the people he crossed the wrong way). When his traits produced the integration of the game, its expansion and the success of the teams he worked for, he was a great man. On other occasions, the result was different and so he became less than that. The ledger is in his favor, but it is a ledger.
(Sources: Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman” by Lee Lowenfish, Wikipedia, SABR, Baseball Reference.com, Baseball Alamanc)
