The Mahatma

"You have to care about baseball," he always insisted, but he was always a little surprised by the depth of his own devotion. "Imagine," Wesley Branch Rickey once said, "a man trained for the law devoting his entire life and energies to something so cosmically unimportant as a game."

As a player, Branch Rickey's contribution to baseball is best forgotten. A no-hit, no-field catcher, he bounced briefly around the majors reaching a sort of apex with the New York Highlanders in 1907, when he batted .182 and permitted the Washington Senators to steal 13 bases in one game. That was enough to convince Rickey that his talents were better suited to the front office. Over the next 50-odd years, with the St. Louis Browns, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Pittsburgh Pirates, he established himself as "the Mahatma," "the Brain," the brightest innovator, shrewdest trader and smartest judge of talent in the history of baseball.

Farmers in the Gashouse. When Rickey returned from the Army in 1919 to his job as president of the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cards were in sorry shape. The only really good ballplayer on the team was Second Baseman Rogers Hornsby. The club was $175,000 in debt; there was no money for a training trip that spring, not even enough for new uniforms--let alone for buying players on the open market. Rickey's answer was to invent the farm system, gaining control of minor-league clubs, using them as training schools for future stars. At first rival big-league bosses hooted at the idea--but they changed their tune when the Cardinal organization produced Rickey's famed "Gashouse Gang" managed by Frankie Frisch and featuring Dizzy Dean, Ducky Medwick, Leo Durocher and Pepper Martin. With as many as 32 minor-league teams operating full blast, Rickey had a virtual monopoly on young talent. The Cardinals won the World Series in 1926--and over the next 16 years they went on to win five Na tional League pennants and three world championships.

Rickey not only changed the strategy of baseball management; he helped change the very tone of the game. In the early 1900s baseball was dominated by rowdies and gamblers. Rickey, a strict Methodist who never drank or swore (his strongest epithet was "Judas Priest!") and refused all his life to attend ball games on Sunday, gave respectability to the sport. He lectured his players endlessly on strength of character and nobility of purpose. "Luck," he liked to tell them, "is the residue of design." He popularized "the Knothole Gang" and Ladies' Day--designed to attract a proper citizenry to the ballpark.

Think as One. At Brooklyn in 1947, Rickey broke baseball's long-established color line, hiring Jackie Robinson as the major leagues' first Negro ballplayer. Rickey always insisted that his motives were practical, not social: "I don't care whether a man has green stripes and hair all over, as long as he can play the game." But he made no secret of his personal feelings about racial prejudice. "We will never think as a nation," he said, "until the entire nation is permitted to think and act as one."

Branch Rickey might have become a practicing attorney--but he quit after trying one case. He might have been elected Governor of Missouri--but he chose to turn down the Republican nomination in 1940. From the day he played his first pickup game in the 1890s until he died last week at 83, baseball was his career, his hobby and his life. He never really rued his decision ("The game has given me joy"), but there were times when he wondered aloud, balancing a baseball in his palm: "This symbol? Is it worth a man's whole life?"

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