Rickey & Robinson (20 page)

The Dodgers were paying a grizzled ex-spitball pitcher with the English manor house name of Burleigh Grimes to manage. (Grimes, a surly sort, once punched a Brooklyn child who had the audacity to ask him for an autograph after a loss.) The Dodgers were also paying off
Casey Stengel, who had been fired as manager at the end of the 1936 season. Stengel’s Dodgers had finished seventh. On top of that they were still paying off Max Carey, born Maximilian Carnarius, a star center fielder in his day and a man who led the National League in stolen bases 10 times. Carey had been fired as Dodger manager after the season of 1933. Carey’s Dodgers had finished sixth. Thus the 1937 Dodgers simultaneously were paying a Brooklyn troika, one man to manage the team and two men not to manage the team. The 1937 Dodgers finished seventh. It is a wonder that they finished at all. During this period, the Dodgers’ years in the wilderness, Eddie Murphy of the New York
Sun
wrote an amusing comment one spring. “Overconfidence may cost the Dodgers fifth place.”

Late in the booming decade of the 1920s Steve McKeever decided to enlarge Ebbets Field by extending the upper deck all the way down the right-field foul line and above the border of right from the center-field side. He could not completely enclose the playing area because Bedford Avenue, which ran beyond the right-field wall, was a major Brooklyn thoroughfare, four lanes of heavily traveled cobblestone. Neither the city fathers nor borough sachems were inclined to build an underpass, in retrospect a significant error in urban planning. The right-field wall, topped by a stiff screen, interrupted by a scoreboard, stood as long as the Dodgers played in Brooklyn. Caroms shot off that wall in difficult and unpredictable ways. Dixie Walker and later Carl Furillo played those caroms brilliantly, and the wall became a wonder of the game. When Duke Snider saw film of a wrecker’s iron ball smashing the right-field wall to rubble, he reacted in an understandable way. The Duke of Flatbush wept.

The remodeled Ebbets Field would seat 28,000. Steve McKeever’s expansion plans required money and here is where George V. McLaughlin and the Brooklyn Trust Company entered the world of baseball. The bank lent the Dodgers $800,000, with Ebbets Field posted as security.
Very soon the loan ran smack into the Great Depression. The Dodgers of 1930 had a good but not outstanding team in an exceptional baseball season. Hack Wilson, who stood five foot six but had an 18-inch neck, walloped 58 home runs for the Chicago Cubs. Bill Terry, a truculent character who played first base for the Giants, batted .401. This prompted Ogden Nash later to write in
Sport
magazine:

T is for Terry

The Giant from Memphis

Whose .400 average

You can’t overemphis
.

The Dodgers, who had in Dazzy Vance arguably the best pitcher in the National League, finished fourth. Hack Wilson’s Cubs finished third. Bill Terry’s Giants came in second. The pennant winner? None but Branch Rickey’s St. Louis Cardinals, who went on to win an exciting World Series over Detroit, despite the hard hitting of the Tigers’ G-men, Charley Gehringer and Hank Greenberg.

The general baseball excitement of that season fueled an attendance record in Brooklyn, 1,097,329, or better than 15,000 paying customers for each home date. But as the team slumped and the Depression struck, the seventh-place Dodgers of 1934 drew only 434,188, a disastrous drop to about 6,000 fans per home date. That season the Dodgers regularly played to 22,000 empty seats, most of which were in hock to a bank.

I well remember my father taking me to games in ’34. I was six years old but already in love with baseball. Games started at 3:15 and even when we got to Ebbets Field as late as 3:00, a good assortment of seats remained vacant in the grandstands, near first base and third. Good news for my dad and myself, but a financial horror story for the Mac boys, Keever and Laughlin.

The team’s poor play and, more than that, the new huge debt frightened Steve McKeever, now in his 80s, and alarmed the various
heirs of Charlie Ebbets. McLaughlin was a haughty character, but he had a good feel for baseball. He knew something had to be done, beyond firing a manager every few seasons.

Backed by the promissory notes, McLaughlin asked the trustees to let him hire a new chief executive. “With all respect,” he told McKeever, “you’re not a youngster anymore.” The creditor’s request had the force of a loaded pistol.

McLaughlin talked to Ford Frick, the president of the National League. Frick said he was enjoying his current job. McLaughlin telephoned Branch Rickey in St. Louis. If Rickey’s messianic mission to integrate baseball was stirring, he kept it concealed. You could not reasonably start the integration of baseball in St. Louis, the most overtly racist city in the major leagues. But Rickey said he was content with the Cardinals. He recommended that McLaughlin contact Larry MacPhail, who was doing interesting things in Cincinnati, including, on May 24, 1935, staging the first night game in major-league history. (The Reds defeated the Phillies, 2 to 1.)

The modern Dodgers can fairly be said to date from January 18, 1938, when Larry MacPhail met with George McLaughlin and laid down his terms for taking over management of the team. He said the old leadership would have to step aside. He and he alone would run the Dodgers. McLaughlin agreed. MacPhail needed continuing support from the bank. Ebbets Field had fallen into disrepair. Some seats were broken. All needed paint. Cement was crumbling in the dugouts. All told, he had to have $200,000 for ballpark improvements. He got it. He had to bring in more baseball talent quickly and that would cost more money. McLaughlin lent him $50,000 to buy the premier first baseman, Dolph Camilli, from the Phillies. A day later Steve McKeever died at the age of 83, supposedly of pneumonia. But the author Bob McGee suggests that what really happened was this: When Old Man McKeever found out that the Dodgers were
paying $50,000 for the contract of just one player, he died of shock.

In June of 1938, MacPhail hired Babe Ruth as first-base coach for a salary of $15,000. At the age of 43, the big man still had power and crowds came to see him drive batting practice fastballs over the screen in right. Brooklyn fans were excited at the prospect of Ruth managing the Dodgers a year later. So was Ruth. When the job went instead to Leo Durocher, Babe Ruth burst into tears. (MacPhail felt Ruth lacked the essential inside baseball shrewdness he felt that managers should have.)

Later MacPhail cobbled together a $75,000 package to buy Pee Wee Reese from the Boston Red Sox farm team in Louisville. The manager of the Red Sox, aging shortstop Joe Cronin, was happy to see Reese go to another league. And in 1941, putting together a pennant-winning ball club, MacPhail gave $65,000 to the Chicago Cubs for the great second baseman William Jennings Bryan Herman, who answered to Billy.

As the bank had big bucks, MacPhail had a fine eye. He brought in two seeming journeymen from the American League. Dixie Walker became a National League batting champion. Whitlow Wyatt won 22 games for the Dodgers in 1941. That season Brooklyn won its first pennant in 21 seasons. In 1937, the year before MacPhail arrived, the Dodgers drew 482,481 fans, or about 6,200 for each date at Ebbets Field. In 1941 the Dodgers drew 1,214,910 fans, the highest total in baseball. The team was now averaging more than 15,000 customers for each home date. You could no longer find empty seats close to first base or third near game time at Ebbets Field. When I went now with my father he bought reserved seat tickets in advance. They were priced at $1.65.

MacPhail brought night baseball and Red Barber to Brooklyn. He experimented with baseballs colored yellow, like today’s tennis balls, and, courting the Brooklyn Irish, he ordered new uniforms of Kelly green. Neither idea worked out but MacPhail was always
experimenting, always hustling, and as we learned in Brooklyn, always restless. Some say he was the first to hold a Ladies Day. On some such occasions the women were presented with silk stockings in addition to admission for 10 cents. (Many ladies to be sure brought dates, who had to pay full price, ranging up to $2.20 for a box seat.) “The shrill cries of the female rooters,” wrote Frank Graham in the New York
Sun
, “pierced the ears of passers-by blocks away.”

Hokum, grumbled the old-line conservatives who had followed the drab Dodgers of Steve McKeever. But MacPhail and his team so roused the borough that after the Dodgers clinched the 1941 pennant, the
Brooklyn Eagle
reported that a million fans watched the victory parade along Flatbush Avenue. That would be every second resident of the borough, including shut-ins, newborns and hospital patients. The
Eagle
was a rooting paper and its number seems absurdly high, but photographic evidence shows that many Brooklynites on the parade route held signs that read: “Pee Wee Reese for President.”

The year 1942 was a mixed bag. As I’ve noted, the Dodgers won 104 games, but the team lost its best player on July 1, when Harold “Pete” Reiser ran headfirst into the center-field wall in St. Louis and fractured his skull. He was chasing an Enos Slaughter drive. Reiser was never again the same luminous star; Leo Durocher told me that without that injury Pistol Pete “would have been every bit as good as Willie Mays.” At the very least the point is open for debate.

Given another close pennant race, the fans kept coming to Ebbets Field. For the second straight year, the team drew over a million fans and led the major leagues in attendance. The Yankees, with more than twice as many seats in their stadium, won another pennant, but failed to reach a million and would not until the postwar boom. Small ballpark or no, the Dodgers were the hottest and most profitable franchise in baseball. That Brooklyn was a great baseball town is, quite simply, a matter of public record.

McLaughlin the fan was delighted to have a winning team in Brooklyn, but McLaughlin the banker was not satisfied with the ledger. It is axiomatic in baseball that the concessions people will generally cheat a little, under-reporting sales of beer and even Cracker Jack. They then quietly pocket some of the proceeds. But McLaughlin detected a great diversion of the cash flow. He brought in a tough collection lawyer, who had offices in the Lincoln Building near Grand Central Terminal, to look into profit and loss. That was how Walter Francis O’Malley came into baseball, sniffing down dollar bills and dimes.

Each day’s proceeds have to go promptly into a bank. Leaving them at the ballpark is an open invitation to larceny, thieves at midnight quietly ransacking the empty offices until they strike gold. The Dodgers transferred their receipts from Ebbets Field to the Brooklyn Trust Company downtown, a 20-minute van ride, in large gray duffel bags that were unsealed. Who was stealing and how much was stolen never has been precisely defined, but a Dodger official named Jack Collins, who had been drawing a salary of $7,500, abruptly retired during O’Malley’s investigation. He then bought himself a large motel situated on a prime Florida beach with, I suppose, some of my father’s hot dog money.

“It was so bad,” O’Malley said, “that I couldn’t rectify everything as an outsider. I told McLaughlin that I needed to get inside and become a trustee.” O’Malley was a sure hand with money. He was a season boxholder in Brooklyn, but his interest in baseball seemed no more than casual. McLaughlin lent him $250,000, with which the lawyer bought a 25 percent interest in the Dodgers. The duffel bag pilfering soon stopped. A bit later so did Brooklyn Dodger baseball.

Before McLaughlin died, in 1967, he had stopped speaking to O’Malley. But the banker certainly experienced what sportswriters would call a “torrid” streak. In a stretch of five years he gave audience to three of the most commanding executives in baseball history,
MacPhail, Rickey and O’Malley. All today have plaques in their honor nailed to a wall at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Apparently it was patriotism alone that moved Larry MacPhail to resign as Dodger president, a week before the end of the 1942 season. Suddenly the hottest franchise in baseball faced problems. MacPhail may or may not have paid off the long-standing mortgage. He insisted that he had, but the banker, George McLaughlin, remained a power in the Dodger offices, partly because the heirs of Charlie Ebbets had appointed him trustee for their 50 percent share of Dodger stock.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

BACK IN PITTSBURGH YEARS afterward, Rickey was describing his first meeting with McLaughlin. “Did Larry MacPhail tell you that he paid off the Dodger debt?”

“He said so on the farm he had in Maryland,” I said.

“That is not my recollection,” Rickey said. “MacPhail always was better at spending new money than repaying old obligations. His creditors grew whiskers whilst they waited.

“At any rate I had determined that McLaughlin was critical to the success of my Brooklyn venture and a part of that, surely not all, was proceeding with integration. I believed that the Negro in America was legally but not morally free. I had begun to think that if the right individual, one who possessed great athletic gifts
and
great self-control, could be located, we could make a difference that should be celebrated.”

He paused. The Pittsburgh players, who were underperforming before us at Forbes Field, are mostly forgotten now. Gair Allie at shortstop. Curt Roberts at second. Toby Atwell catching. No Coopers-town plaques for these people. These Pirates of 1954 would finish last, 44 games out of first place.

“I remember that it was a bitter cold January day,” Rickey said. “I can
still envision the gray and somewhat forbidding bank building. It was located at the corner of Montague and Clinton streets, not two blocks from my office at 215 Montague, and constructed of gray stone in a style modeled after buildings of the Italian Renaissance.

“McLaughlin knew baseball as a fan, which is by no means a criticism. He was the financier and a leader of the Brooklyn Roman Catholic Establishment. I was a Midwestern Methodist, a grown-up farm boy, from out of town. But I was learning about the remarkable borough called Brooklyn and I tell you with no false modesty that I knew the game of baseball.