Branch Rickey
Wesley Branch Rickey was an American baseball player, manager, sports executive, and team owner. Rickey was instrumental in breaking the baseball color line by signing black player Jackie Robinson. He also created the framework for the modern minor league farm system, encouraged the major leagues to add new teams through his involvement in the proposed Continental League, introduced the batting helmet, and created the standard 20-80 scouting scale. He was posthumously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1967.
Rickey played in Major League Baseball for the St. Louis Browns and New York Highlanders from 1905 through 1907. After struggling as a player, Rickey returned to college, graduating from the University of Michigan. Back in the major leagues in 1913, he embarked on a successful career variously as a manager, executive, and owner, starting with the St. Louis Browns, then the St. Louis Cardinals, Brooklyn Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates. The Cardinals elected him to their team Hall of Fame in 2014.
Rickey also had a career in football, as a player for the professional Shelby Blues and as a coach at Ohio Wesleyan University and Allegheny College. He received the nickname "Mahatma" after sportswriter Tom Meany read an article describing Mahatma Gandhi as a combination of "your father and Tammany Hall."
Early life
Rickey was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, the son of Jacob Frank Rickey and Emily. Rickey was the uncle of Beth Rickey, a Louisiana political activist. He graduated from Valley High School in Lucasville, Ohio, in 1899.College
Rickey was a catcher on the baseball team at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he obtained his B.A. Rickey was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity.Rickey attended the University of Michigan, where he received his LL.B.
While at Michigan, Rickey applied for the job as Michigan's baseball coach. Rickey asked every alumnus he had ever met to write letters to Philip Bartelme, the school's athletic director, on his behalf. Bartelme recalled, "Day after day those letters came in." Bartelme was reportedly impressed with Rickey's passion for baseball and his idealism about the proper role of athletics on a college campus. Bartelme convinced the dean of the law school that Rickey could handle his law studies while serving as the school's baseball coach. Bartelme reportedly called Rickey into his office to tell him he had the job if only "to put a stop to those damn letters that come in every day." The hiring also marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship and business relationship between Rickey and Bartelme. Bartelme and Rickey worked together for most of the next 35 years."
During his four years as head baseball coach from 1910 to 1913, Rickey's record was 68–32–4. In his final season, the Michigan squad — led by brilliant sophomore first baseman and left-handed pitcher, future Hall of Famer George Sisler, who batted.445 — compiled a 21–4–1 won-lost record, a winning percentage of.827.
Playing career
Before his front office days, Rickey played both football and baseball professionally.Professional football career
In 1902, Rickey played professional football for the Shelby Blues of the "Ohio League", the direct predecessor to the modern National Football League Rickey often played for pay with Shelby while he was attending Ohio Wesleyan. During his time with Shelby, Rickey became friends with his teammate Charles Follis, who was the first black professional football player. He also played against him on October 17, 1903, when Follis ran for a 70-yard touchdown against the Ohio Wesleyan football team. After that game Rickey praised Follis, calling him "a wonder." It is also possible that Follis' poise and class under the pressures of such racial tension, as well as his exceptional play in spite of it, inspired Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson decades later. Rickey, however, stated his inspiration for bringing Jackie Robinson into baseball was the ill-treatment he saw received by his black catcher Charles Thomas on the Ohio Wesleyan baseball team coached by Rickey in 1903 and 1904 and the gentlemanly way Thomas handled it. When Rickey signed Robinson, Charles Thomas' story was made known in the papers.Professional baseball career
Minor leagues
In 1903, Rickey signed a contract with the Terre Haute Hottentots of the Class B Central League, making his professional debut on June 20. He was assigned to the Le Mars Blackbirds of the Class D Iowa–South Dakota League. During this period, he also spent two seasons–1904 and 1905—coaching baseball, basketball and football at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, where he also served as athletic director and as an instructor of Shakespeare, English, and freshman history.Major leagues
St. Louis Browns (1905–1906)
A left-handed-batting catcher, Rickey debuted in the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns in 1905.New York Highlanders (1907)
Sold to the New York Highlanders in 1907, Rickey could neither hit nor field while with the club, and his batting average dropped below.200. One opposing team stole 13 bases in one game while Rickey was behind the plate, which was an American League record until 1911. Rickey also injured his throwing arm and retired as a player following that season.Managerial and executive career
St. Louis Browns (1913–1916)
Rickey was in his third year as the Wolverines' baseball coach when St. Louis Browns owner Robert Hedges inquired if Rickey was interested in running the minor-league Kansas City Blues, which Hedges was thinking of purchasing. Citing his commitment to Michigan, Rickey turned him down, but agreed to do some part-time scouting for the Browns in the West during the summer of 1912. That September, Hedges offered Rickey a job as his top assistant and business manager of the MLB Browns themselves, at a substantial salary increase, effective after Michigan's 1913 baseball season. Rickey signed the deal on June 1, 1913. After three months in the Browns' front office, on September 17, 1913, the 31 year-old Rickey was also appointed field manager, replacing incumbent George Stovall. Veteran players Jimmy Austin and, later, Burt Shotton, became Rickey's "Sunday managers", running the Browns on the Sabbath in the devout Rickey's absence.The Browns, in the midst of one of several low points during their 52-year history, were 52–90 and in last place at the time. Rickey steered them to a 5–6–1 record over the last 12 games of the season. Then, in, they improved by 14 games, jumping from eighth to fifth place in the American League. However, the Browns took a giant step backwards; despite the June signing of the player who would become one of the greatest in franchise history—future Hall of Famer George Sisler—they went only 63–91, 8½ games worse than in 1914 edition.
Still, Rickey maintained Hedges' confidence. But during the 1915–1916 offseason, as part of Major League Baseball's the settlement of the Federal League "war", Hedges sold the Browns to the former operator of the Federal League's St. Louis Terriers, Philip DeCatesby Ball. Ball brought along his own manager, Fielder Jones, and restricted an unhappy Rickey to front-office duties. Compounding matters, the pair's personalities clashed, and as the 1916 season concluded, Rickey began looking for a new job.
St. Louis Cardinals (1917–1942)
Early years and World War I service (1917–1918)
At the same time Rickey was struggling with ownership change and on-field failings with the American League St. Louis Browns, the National League's St. Louis Cardinals were also enduring a period of turmoil with both. In 1916, they had finished eighth and last in the NL and attracted a league-worst 224,308 fans to Robison Field, and their owner, Helene Hathaway Britton, put them up for sale. A local consortium of businessmen, including automobile dealer Sam Breadon, quickly formed to buy the financially strapped team and keep it from moving elsewhere. Searching for a chief executive, they reached out to seven St. Louis sportswriters and asked for recommendations; all seven separately suggested Rickey.Before Rickey could join the Cardinals he had to sort out his existing obligations to Ball and the Browns. American League president and founder Ban Johnson, determined to keep Rickey in his league, pressured Ball to seek a temporary injunction to enforce the terms of Rickey's contract. The dispute was resolved in April 1917, and Rickey became the Cardinals' club president, business manager, and a minority owner. Apart from his year as president of the Continental League in 1959–1960, Rickey would spend the remainder of his baseball career in the National League.
Each of Rickey's first two seasons with the Cardinals would be overshadowed by the United States' entry into World War I, on April 6, 1917.
Despite the team's last-place standing in 1916, Rickey inherited two Hall-of-Fame quality assets: 21-year-old infielder Rogers Hornsby and the Cardinals' manager, Miller Huggins. Each contributed to a strong bounce-back season in 1917: Hornsby batted.327 in 145 games and led the team in hits, and Huggins guided the squad to 82 wins and a third-place finish. During the 1920s, Hornsby would become the cornerstone of a National League pennant contender and 1926 World Series champion. But Huggins, who had been a member of a rival ownership group that lost its bid for the Cardinals to Breadon's syndicate, left to manage the New York Yankees at season's end; there he would lead an eventual American League and MLB powerhouse to six pennants and three world championships before dying at 51 during the 1929 season.
The war-disrupted 1918 campaign saw the Cardinals, managed by veteran minor-league pilot Jack Hendricks, perform poorly. They plummeted to last place in the National League, winning only 51 of 131 games during the shortened regular season, which ended September 2. Rickey, however, had by that point already enlisted as an officer in the United States Army. His absence from the team began August 31, 1918.
He embarked by steamship for France and the Western Front in mid-September. Recovering from a bout of pneumonia contracted aboard ship, Rickey commanded a training unit of the Chemical Warfare Service that included Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. His unit saw action as part of the First Gas Regiment. Six weeks after arriving, the November 11, 1918, armistice ended hostilities, Rickey and returned to the United States on December 23. He succeeded Hendricks as the Cardinals' field manager for 1919.