Branch Rickey (14 page)

Rickey got Christine on the phone. “You are a beautiful flower. You have a lovely garden for your life. And you go into it and find weeds.” Only her most heartfelt pleading allowed her to remain in the city and the model business until school started again in the fall.

Then Rickey was gone from Brooklyn, first back to St. Louis, which was no good for him anymore, and to Pittsburgh, which was not much better. So he sat home and watched television and went to meetings.

Rickey sits in retirement in his splendid house in Fox Chapel, outside of Pittsburgh, and watches the Pirates and the New York Yankees in the first game of the 1960 World Series. They play just down the road, at Forbes Field. In his last job in baseball, Rickey had put this Pittsburgh team together. The Pirates had a 6-2 lead going into the eighth inning. Here was Roberto Clemente, as good a player as you could ever find, and Dick Groat, Bill Virdon, Bob Skinner, and Bill Mazeroski, who was the last player Rickey scouted, and that's where it all ended, all fifty years or so of running big-league baseball teams.

Rickey's other priceless find for the Pirates, Elroy Face, just about invented relief pitching. Through his years, Rickey always said that he didn't think much of relievers. In Pittsburgh, he left Elroy Face sitting on the bullpen bench, holding a pitcher of ice water while he waited for the fire bell to ring. He is the first major leaguer to save 20 games more than once. At this moment he waits for his first chance to save a World Series game. The word “save” is what it says: the relief pitcher comes into the game with his team ahead but shaky and the other team is supposed to have a shot and Elroy gets out there and calmly shatters opposing hearts by removing the bat from the hands of anybody who comes up.

He had a new pitch that year. Branch Rickey had made finding it a condition of his employment. Elroy was with the Pirates' New Orleans farm team in spring training at Fort Myers, Florida, listening to Rickey, whose sunhat was pulled down to these eyes that sparkled with excitement. Rickey, an old catcher, could talk incessantly about grips. “A fastball and a curve isn't enough,” he said. “You need something, a change. To put indecision into a batter. ‘What is coming now?' Put a question in the hitter's mind, to bother the timing, to raise doubt.” Rickey said that Joe Page, the old Yankee relief pitcher, was around the camps looking for a job. Page was throwing an obscure pitch, a forkball. Face heard this, too. In Florida, he saw Page's hand, fingers spread wide, and watched the pitch.

That season, Elroy tried a forkball at New Orleans. The first thing he had to do was remind his forefinger and middle finger to make room for the ball. He was born with the space. Others had to work for a year to teach the fingers to spread. Even young fingers groan. The forkball was held between the two fingers without touching the seam. He threw it with a fastball motion, but the ball came out as a change of speed and right in front of the plate it dived. One way this time, another way the next. If you never saw the pitch before, and only a few had, it gave trouble to the eyes.

In spring of 1959, Rickey said to him, “I hear you have a new pitch.” Face was throwing and Rickey was in the box behind the plate at Fort Pierce. His forehead was pressed against the netting. Face threw. Fastball. Well, we know he can do that. He watched Face's curve. All right. See if he has another. The forkball came in. Dropped like a stone. Again, Face threw his forkball. It dropped in another direction. Marvelous. This boy did not sit around for the full year. He worked!

In 1959 Elroy won 18 games and lost 1. These were huge days in his life and he tied them all to Rickey. When he married his fiancée, June, in her family home at McKees Rocks, he grabbed her hand during the reception and took her out to the car for a quick drive to the Pirates office at Forbes Field. It was during the All-Star break. He walked into Rickey's office with his new wife. Rickey was elated. He believed that all his players should be married. It grounded them. When Elroy said they had been married in a Catholic church, he was even happier. Rickey loved religions. A long time ago, in 1906, he promised his girlfriend, Jane Moulton, that he would marry her if he had a successful year and they would know that by June. She wanted the marriage, but wouldn't have minded if he dropped baseball. She was a merchant's daughter and was not quite delirious over these uneducated farm boys and gas station attendants. By June, Rickey was catching in the major leagues and he made good on his promise. He married Jane in 1906 in a Methodist ceremony. They were married for over fifty years.

Elroy Face later became the first person anybody in the Pirates ever saw in a Pittsburgh divorce court.

Right here in the World Series clutch, it is the eighth inning and Pittsburgh is ahead, 6-2. The first Yankee batter is on base. That's when the phone rang in the bullpen. Face was up, removing his jacket. Of course the call is for him. His first warm-up pitch to the bullpen catcher Bob Oldis is the forkball. It performs.

A batter later, Face is on the mound, and Mickey Mantle steps in. He is batting left-handed against the righty Face. He starts swishing that bat. Elroy throws his slider. He likes this pitch in a sun-shadow hour. His slider is a ripple in the light, going sideways about six inches and a little down, coming in fast in the shadow on the left-handed batter. Strike one. The next pitch is another strike. Then, at last, Elroy throws his forkball. Mantle looks for it but it escapes his eyes and dives to his knees. Mantle is furious. He is a great competitor and he is walking off with the bat on his shoulder.

It was the first of three saved World Series games by Face. Rickey watched this on television. He had started the year with great energy and plans to start a third major league. But then two heart attacks left him watching from an easy chair.

In the last inning of the seventh game of the Series, Bill Mazeroski was the lead-off man for the Pirates. The score was 9-9. Mazeroski had been a second baseman for Hollywood in the Pacific Coast League. Rickey was enthralled with Mazeroski's fast hands. They came from growing up with a coal miner father who had lost a foot in the mines and sat each day in a bare living room and rolled a baseball across a linoleum floor to his kid. Through so many hours each day, the boy bent and scooped and leaped to get his father's throws. All you had to do was mention Mazeroski's name to bring tears to Branch Rickey's eyes.

Ralph Terry, the Yankee pitcher, threw. Mazeroski looked. He did not look at the second pitch. He hit it over the left-field fence for the game and the championship and Branch Rickey sat home and watched Mazeroski's joyous gallop around the bases.

 

Go back a few years, to 1951, when Eddie McCarrick, a scout who had always worked for Rickey, brought a contract for the Pittsburgh Pirates minor leagues to a young ballplayer and college student, Mario Cuomo of South Jamaica, Queens, and St. John's University. The contract said Cuomo was to get $2,000 for signing. Nowhere did it say he had to do anything more than sign the paper to receive the $2,000.

His father, Andrea, stood behind the counter of the grocery store under the apartment where they lived, on the corner of 150th Street and 97th Avenue, and looked at the unfamiliar document. He was from the hills outside Naples and found English at least unfamiliar.

“Baseball?” he said.

“Yes, Pa.”

“No, you finish school.”

“But I can finish school and still do the baseball.”

“No.”

“I get two thousand dollars and I don't even have to play.”

Still the father was doubtful. There then arrived a letter from Branch Rickey saying that he wanted Mario to finish college, for it would help him and the Pittsburgh Pirates system. An educated ballplayer is best, he said.

Andrea Cuomo seemed impressed with the letter. He waited until Mario was not in the store. He then walked around to a neighborhood lawyer who spoke Italian and had him inspect the letter and the contract. The lawyer said both were all right.

On the Easter vacation break from St. John's, Cuomo went to Deland, Florida, the Pirates minor league camp, and was placed with the Brunswick, Georgia, Class D team. He was in the batting cage, trying to hit balls coming out of a fractured pitching machine. One was too high, the next in the dirt, the third perhaps hittable. The balls were scuffed. Then an old guy came into the cage. He wore khaki pants, a T-shirt, and no baseball spikes. He didn't need a uniform or much of anything else, just a bat. He was George Sisler, and when he played, he hit .400.

Cuomo had trouble with an inside pitch and Sisler said quietly, “Don't fight it.” The machine threw inside and Sisler stepped back and hit the ball hard. “Now for an outside pitch,” Cuomo remembers him saying, “just lean over.” An outside pitch came and Sisler hit it as hard as he had the inside pitch.

Cuomo was watching him closely. Sisler had a set of eyes and a pair of hands that worked as one. A freak, Mario decided.

Chasing flies in the outfield, Cuomo put whatever he had into every pursuit and wound up with a charley horse. He was told that Rickey wanted to see him. Mario walked up to the house that was the Pirates camp headquarters. Sitting on the porch was Rickey. “He asked me about my leg and then he said you need patience. You don't run wild on the first day. Then he told me that there was a grandfather bull and his grandson on top of a hill looking at a herd of cows. The grandson said, ‘Let's run down and spear one.' The grandfather said, ‘Why run? Let's take our time, walk easily and spear them all.' I remember being surprised he would tell a story like that. You know, everybody in the camp received a subscription to
Guideposts
. That was a religious magazine. I was still getting it at home long after I was out of baseball.

“Rickey said he wanted to talk to me because I was going to finish college. I remember him telling me, ‘You're fortunate. You have something that a lot of others can't have. Stay with your education. You can try baseball for a while and then you'll have the college helping you for the rest of your life.' ”

There was another contest in those late years to which Branch Rickey paid attention. He thought it important that Richard Nixon sweep past Kennedy in the 1960 election. He was sure his judgment was infallible. To Rickey, the campaign between Nixon and the dreaded Kennedys looked like the final struggle. He saw the end of decades of Republican principles if his man lost, so he put in a thousand phone calls squalling about the Kennedys. One of those calls went to Jackie Robinson and, of course, Robinson listened. By then he was an executive with Chock Full o'Nuts, the fast-food chain, and this had to cause his natural resentments to rise. If this was the best he could find, a job in a company with black help that he was hired to impress, he could barely tolerate it. This was a figure known all over the world, a man with a fine mind, and they had him with countermen. In a letter to a friend, magazine editor Ray Robinson, Jackie wrote, “I feel as strongly in favor of Nixon's principles, ethics and intellectual honesty. Would you have me support a Kennedy who met with one of the worst segregationists in private and then this man, the governor of Alabama, comes out with strong support for Senator Kennedy?”

In his first hours in America, Barack Obama, Sr., made it a few feet out of the airport before the sight took his breath away. He was here to study at the University of Hawaii, whose courses appealed to him, as did the vision of a blessed Hawaiian sun. Studying in Honolulu, he brought a strong thirst. If he could have stayed away from bars, perhaps he wouldn't have missed his son's big day at the White House.

In 1960, one year after Obama arrived at the university, the major Kenyan politician Tom Mboya had 250 more American college scholarships for his Kenyan students, all of whom were to be admitted to big schools that would change their lives. Mboya had sent a telegram to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of whom was John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was starting his campaign for the presidency. A telegram also went to his eventual opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who was delighted at the notion of Kenyans on his side to impress the black vote. Call State and tell them what I want, he told his staff. Why should he, the vice president, lower himself to ask a State Department bureaucrat to fly 250 Kenyans here so they can go to great colleges? The answer is, he should have done just that. The bureaucrats turned Nixon's office down, giving clout a terrible name.

At this time, Branch Rickey was living in Pittsburgh, retired. A true Republican, he made many phone calls to Jackie Robinson, also retired, to complain about Mboya's tactic. He railed, “Kennedy will try to steal home immediately!”

Robinson agreed. He wrote bitterly against Jack Kennedy in a column for the
New York Post
. After that, he called Senator Hugh Scott, the Republican from Pennsylvania, who came on the Senate floor to attack the Kennedys for going around the law and paying privately to bring in the Kenyan students.