Branch Rickey Read Online Free PDF

Jesus as the savior of all, and spread this wherever she went.
    Their granddaughter Emily married a farmer’s son, Jacob Franklin Rickey. The Rickeys came out of Tioga, New York, Baptists turned Wesleyan Methodists. Frank and Emily settled in Madison Township, Ohio, and had a family, including a son, Wesley Branch Rickey, born in December 1881.
    Branch and his older brother, Orla, attended a school that was a four-mile walk from home. There was a bookstore fire in nearby Portsmouth, and the father bought eleven damaged books for a hard-to-come-by $2.25. He purchased Dante’s Inferno , and The Story of the Bible and the New Testament and four volumes of Washington Irving. The father worked on his sons’ reading and the mother on their belief in God.
    On sandlot fields of Ohio, young farm people played for their towns, Turkey Creek and Duck Run and Lucasville. They paid a dollar for a bat and a nickel for a “Nickel Rocket,” which was a baseball that wasn’t worth a dime. An official National League baseball went for a hard dollar and a quarter. The face mask Branch wore cost fifty cents and yielded to any foul tip or wild pitch, almost giving him a new face. His next mask cost four dollars and was the first thing that he grabbed at the end of a game so it wouldn’t be lost or stolen.
    Years later, one of Rickey’s granddaughters, going through the oldest of old files and clippings from The Columbus Dispatch and The Cincinnati Enquirer , noticed accounts of people remembering her grandfather playing in a big game in town. Rickey crouches and catches for Orla, a powerful pitcher for Duck Run, against Dry Run. With the bases loaded in the final inning, Branch called for Orla’s big one. The pitch was big and fast and high, too high for Branch to catch. It sailed over his head, and while he ran to get it three runs raced across the plate. Branch picked up the ball, saw the game was over, and walked straight home. It was a defeat that sat down in his mind and never got up.
    Fifty years on, it is a glorious afternoon at Yankee Stadium in New York, shimmering with World Series tension, and simultaneously roars come up from the stadium’s three packed tiers. Pigeons carrying film circle and then fly into the sky to the newspaper plants downtown. Rickey runs the St. Louis Cardinals, and he has one of the left-handers he loved, Ernie White, up from his famous farm teams, shutting out the Yankees. Shutting out the Yankees in the World Series. Shut them out for nine innings, because in those years pitchers worked a full game. White’s pitches went over nobody’s head. He cut the Yankees off with curves at the knees. It caused Rickey to reminisce in the newspapers about brother Orla’s pitch.
    That Cardinal team of 1942 was Rickey’s, from the first day in spring to the last of fall. It was Rickey’s team right to the uniform shirtfront featuring a pair of redbirds perched on a black baseball bat, copied from a sketch on a napkin left at a women’s luncheon. It might have been the best team baseball ever had, down to the rookie he decided to put in the outfield, a kid named Stanley Frank Musial.
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    Next the Rickey family moved from Duck Run to Lucasville, population 150, because it had schoolrooms in a building, not a shack. The father continued his obsession with his sons’ reading. Rickey’s regular education in Duck Run had required long hours reading at the kitchen table. Many other families did not, or could not, read or write. When Branch came to Lucasville classrooms he was so shy that others believed him to be bone stupid. He immediately began to stutter. It took months of painstaking tutoring by James Finney, an Ohio Wesleyan teacher in training, to cure it. He slowed Rickey’s breathing and tongue. He also left an Ohio Wesleyan logo imprinted on Rickey’s mind.
    Outside the classroom, Rickey learned a different lesson. This came in the form of the