Free Rickey and Robinson by Harvey Frommer

cash. We were always at a distinct disadvantage trying to get players from the minor leagues. Other clubs would outbid us; they had the money and the superior scouting machinery.”
    The rich New York Giants posed the biggest problem for the impoverished Cardinals. Owner Charles Stoneham and manager John McGraw formed a lavish spending combination. Every year they paid top dollar for players to give the Giants reinforcements for the second half of the season. There were times when Rickey or his top scout Charlie Barrett would spot a good prospect in the minor leagues and make an offer to the team. The team’s owner would then approach the Giants or another wealthy major-league team and offer the player for a higher price. Rickey found himself in the frustrating position of scouting talent for his richer competitors. He concluded that since the Cardinals were too poor to buy players, they would have to develop their own.
    The Houston affiliation was quickly followed by a purchase of stock i;n Fort Smith of the Class C Western Association. In 1920, Syracuse was added, a double-A club in the International League. Gradually, full control of the teams came into the hands of the Cardinals. “Experience had taught us,” Rickey explained, “that a partial share of a minorleague team was unsatisfactory; the solution was to own the minor-league club outright.”
    More and more clubs were added. At one point, the Cardinals controlled the supply of players in both the Nebraska State League and the Arkansas-Missouri League.
    New York Giant manager John McGraw called it “a pipe dream.” But the farm system began to yield a rich harvest. A mythology emerged as fuzzy-cheeked recruits from tiny hamlets and backwoods villages across America poured into the St. Louis organization.
    It was said that a Cardinal scout was once driving down a country lane when a rabbit shot out in front of his car, with a strapping youth in hot pursuit. The lad caught the hare just as it was about to enter the forest on the other side of the road. The astonished scout cried out, “What you doin’ boy?”
    “Huntin’ rabbits,” the youth replied.
    “Is that how you hunt rabbits?” “Is there any other way?”
    The scout quickly whipped out a contract and said, “Boy, how’d you like to play for the Cardinals?”
    Competing executives were outraged by Rickey’s efforts to corner the market on young talent. Players in the farm system were called “Rickey’s chain gang.” Baseball Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was a staunch supporter of independently owned minor-league teams and opposed Rickey’s revolutionary farm system. He ruled that a major-league team could control only one team in each minor league.
    In 1920 Rickey was joined by two men who would be key figures on the St. Louis scene for many years. One was a right-handed pitcher from Clayton, Ohio; the other was an Irishman from New York City’s Greenwich Village.
    Jesse Joseph Haines had kicked around in the minor leagues since 1914. Rickey saw Haines pitch just two innings for Kansas City in 1919, but his keen eye for talent told hirp that the twenty-six-year-old Ohioan could star for the Cardinals. Prevailing on a dozen stockholders to sign a bank note for $1o,000, Rickey bought Haines’s contract from Kansas City. Haines was the last player purchased outright during Rickey’s years in St. Louis. He pitched for the Cardinals until 1937, winning a total of 210 games. In 1970, Haines, just one of the many players originally spotted and signed by Rickey, was admitted to the Hall of Fame.
    The Irishman was Sam Breadon, a New Yorker who headed west in 1902 seeking riches. A year and a half younger than Rickey, he had made thousands selling automobiles in St. Louis during its World’s Fair year of 1904. As Breadon bought more and more stock in the Cardinals, he became a major force in the organization. In 1920, with Jones’s backing, Breadon was elected president of the