Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss

of Design
    RIDICULING THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES WAS ONE OF THE simple pleasures of the national pastime in the first half of the 1950s. The Boy Buffoons of Baseball, Life magazine called them. “The atrocities they committed under the guise of major league baseball were monstrous,” wrote Marshall Smith. “Pirate pitchers threw the ball in the general direction of home plate and ducked. Pirate batters missed signs as blithely as they missed baseballs. Pirate fielding was so graceful that the team gave the opposition four or five outs per inning. Sportswriters accused Pirates of running the bases with their heads tucked under their arms.” When the club’s top minor league manager wanted to scare one of his underachieving players, he threatened to send him up to Pittsburgh. The Pirates were bound for the cellar every year; the only tension came with guessing how many games back they might finish. In 1952 when they were accused of fielding a team of midgets, infielders so short that balls bounded over them for doubles, they ended up fifty-four and a half games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers.All of this was overseen by Pittsburgh’s esteemed general manager, Branch Rickey.
    In Pittsburgh, some skeptics said, Wesley Branch Rickey finally met his match—or worse, let the game pass him by. For more than four decades, since he had graduated from Michigan Law and got into baseball management, Rickey, an erudite Presbyterian from Lucasville, Ohio, had been regarded as the one true genius of the sport. Red Smith, the New York sportswriter, called him “a giant among pygmies.” Before coming over to run the hapless Pirates in 1950, at the seasoned age of sixty-nine, he had built two of the century’s dominantNational League clubs, first the Gas House Gang in St. Louis, and next what would become the Boys of Summer in Brooklyn. His place in history was assured by a single bold act, breaking the color line with the signing of Jackie Robinson, but there was far more to him than that. It was as a measure of respect that he became known as the Mahatma. He was cool and manipulative in his transactions, meticulous with his records, formal and pompous in his speech, stingy with his money, always curious and innovative, brutally sharp in his assessments, and interested equally in a player’s psychological disposition and his ability to learn an elusive hook slide.
    All events in Mr. Rickey’s world could be studied, categorized, and explained. Good things did not fall upon people, or baseball clubs, by accident. He was a man of sayings, and his most famous phrase came at the end of this thought: “Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference or inattention are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”
    And what was his design for the Pirates? “The Pittsburgh club was in last place on merit and not by mishap or circumstance,” Rickey said when he took over, and when they got better it would not be through luck. He doubled the number of minor league affiliates and started stocking them with young players, underscoring his belief that, in baseball, the surest way to get quality was through quantity. He spent what to him seemed like a huge sum ($900,000) on prospects, most of whom flopped. He worked to rid the team of popular players who in his opinion could never take the Pirates to a championship, Ralph Kiner prime among them. Kiner, the slow-footed slugger who won four straight home-run titles (and eventually seven), was not only beloved in Pittsburgh but was also a duck-hunting companion of the owner, John Galbreath. But Rickey was so determined to trade him that he wrote Galbreath an eight-page, single-spaced letter on March 25, 1952, enunciating