Menu
Good Sports: Mike Mitchell and his praise of Branch Rickey "the innovator"
Good Sports is a column featured weekly in the Southeast Missourian and on semoball.com. It is primarily designed to showcase people who have impacted the sporting life of Southeast Missouri, so that readers may get to know them more fully. Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Today: Mike Mitchell, 54, founder of Semoball in September 2006 and the author of a self-published 2020 book, “Mr. Rickey’s Redbirds: Baseball, Beer, Scandals and Celebrations in St. Louis.” Born in Sikeston, Mitchell is a graduate of Chaffee High School and holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia and University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
There have been multiple books written about Branch Rickey, even a movie starring Harrison Ford. What new perspective did you bring to this legendary figure?
When I moved back to St. Louis in 2013, I started reading baseball books and was curious about early Cardinal history. Not much had been written about the 1926 Cardinals, who beat the Yankees in the World Series that year. There was a longer story to be told about the ’26 team and Rickey was central to the story. It all started there.
Why was 1926 pivotal for the Cardinals?
After ’26, the Cardinals emerge out of the shadow of the cross-town St. Louis Browns to become the dominant National League team for the next two decades. Between 1926 and 1946, the Redbirds won nine of 21 pennants. Rickey was in charge for six of them. You have to remember when Rickey left the Browns for the Cardinals, the Cards had so little money in 1919 they couldn’t hold a proper spring training.
Say a little more about the Browns, since 1953 known as the Baltimore Orioles.
The Browns were the landlord at old Sportsman’s Park a hundred years ago. The Redbirds were the second team in St. Louis back in those days. In 1922, the Browns drew 700,000 fans, 200,000 more than the Cardinals that year.
You obviously admire Rickey.
He was an incredible innovator. He created baseball’s farm system. He signed Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. He owned a batting helmet company. When Rickey oversaw the Pittsburgh Pirates, he required the Bucs to wear helmets at the plate long before the league made it mandatory. He was instrumental in the formation of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the 1950s. And, of course, when he was in the front office for a team – especially the Cardinals and Dodgers – they generally won.
He was a teetotaler.
Yes, Rickey was a staunch advocate of Prohibition, and in a way his return to the Cardinals late in his life is the ultimate irony.
Why an irony?
Here’s a guy who detested drinking and when he comes back to the Cardinals in 1963, in his eighties, he works for a team owned by Anheuser-Busch, the biggest brewer in the nation.
Rickey doesn’t last long in his last go-round with the Redbirds.
No, he came back to the team as a consultant in 1963 and by October of ’64, he and the team parted ways. He dies in 1965. Here is the problem. Bing Devine was the general manager, but Rickey had been the man in charge all his adult life. Devine felt this huge shadow lurking over him because it seems clear in retrospect, Rickey really wanted to run the franchise.
1964 was a strange year for the Cardinals.
Yes, and a very successful one on the field too. The ’64 Cards won the Series that season, beating the Yanks in seven games without Stan Musial, but with Lou Brock, Mike Shannon, Curt Flood, Bill White, Tim McCarver and Bob Gibson. Off the field, there was trouble. Devine is fired as GM in August and a day or so after the Series in October, Redbirds manager Johnny Keane bolts St. Louis to skipper the hated Yankees, the team the Cards just defeated to take the title.
You can’t make this stuff up.
No. Branch Rickey was respected but not universally loved. In the book, I point out McCarver took offense at remarks Rickey apparently directed at the catcher during spring training. I quote McCarver as saying of Rickey, “I despised the guy.” I also have a photograph of a 1963 critical of what he saw as Gibson’s inability to hold runners on base. “He needs a lot of coaching,” Rickey wrote in April 1963, of the future Hall of Fame pitcher.
Major league baseball is set to resume late this month. Fans witnessed wealthy owners and players squabbling over money when so many ordinary people lost their jobs to the pandemic. Is this an image problem for MLB?
People’s memories are short. If you’re a fan of a team and it starts winning, you come back. Short-term damage to the image? Yes. Long-term? I’m not sure. It took time for baseball to get the fans back after the disastrous mid-season 1994 strike. It is said Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa saved baseball with their ’98 home run chase.
It can be a slow game because unlike every other major team sport, in baseball, there is no clock.
Yes, but years ago, there was a clock.
What?
The baseball historian Bill James likes to say the game did have a clock many years ago. It was called the sun. When it went down, you stopped playing. No artificial lighting. You’re right, though. The game used to be played at a much faster pace decades ago. A two-hour game was a rarity, now it’s the rule. There were no commercial delays back in the ‘30s and ‘40s.
Does anything make you scratch your head about the game?
Why do you letter a hitter step out of the batter’s box after every pitch to adjust his helmet, batting gloves, knee pads, shoelaces? Cut all that out and it’ll shorten the time.
Say a word about Chaffee, a town built for the train.
Yes, the old Frisco railroad. A small, safe place to grow up. You knew just about everyone. You could ride your bicycle anywhere. Anywhere I was in Chaffee, I never had to lock my car.
For more information about the book, go to rickeysredbirds.com