Read The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World for Free Online

but had no more success than Rickey. On March 1, 1947, Powell issued an announcement: “The Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization is withdrawing from the Dodgers’ Knothole Club.” Leo Durocher “is undermining the moral training of Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Youth. The C.Y.O. cannot continue to have our youngsters associated with a man who represents an example in complete contradiction to our moral teachings.”
    It may seem surprising to have Walter O’Malley, the Big Oom, the most overpowering baseball executive in history, enter the story losing his first case.
    “It doesn’t surprise me,” said William Shea, the late Manhattan lawyer and power broker for whom the Mets’ ballpark would be named. “Walter was one lousy lawyer.”
    We were walking toward Gage and Tollner’s, a gaslight restaurant in downtown Brooklyn, on a spring evening after a meeting at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
    “How can you say that, Bill? O’Malley made more money out of baseball than anyone in history.”
    “That’s right,” Shea said, “but he was one lousy lawyer. O’Malley was the most brilliant businessman I’ve ever met, but we were talking law here, weren’t we?
    “Of course he lost when he tried to plead Durocher’s case to that priest. He wasn’t
trying
to lose to embarrass Rickey. He just lost.
    “I wouldn’t have let O’Malley plead a parking ticket for me.”
    We move, in our time warp, back to the approximate present, at La Jolla, California, where Emil J. “Buzzie” Bavasi, a man who kept the secrets, has retired to a towering hill. From his living room, Bavasi watches migrating whales stir the surface of the metallic blue Pacific Ocean. “Of course I’m comfortable,” Bavasi says in his affluence. “Always have been. But I worked in baseball for forty-six years and now that it’s over I don’t get a pension. Not a dime. Did you ever hear of anybody else in baseball forty-six years without a pension? Assistant trainers get pensions. Not me.”
    Bavasi is bitching without malice, comfortable bitching to someone he first befriended in 1952. “I’m gonna tell you something nobody knows,” Bavasi says. He is heavier than he should be — thirty-five pounds too heavy, he complains — but his eyes flicker with youthful amusement. “You’ve gotta get it right. Well, maybe you won’t, but you gotta try. Agreed? You know Ford Frick brought me into baseball, in the Brooklyn organization, right after the war. So I was there, I was working there, when the idea to integrate baseball hatched.
    “This is what
really
happened. For damn near half a century, Branch Rickey has gotten all the credit and that isn’t right. Rickey owned a quarter of the Dodgers. Twenty-five percent. The other partners were John Smith, who owned Pfizer Chemical; Jim Mulvey, a power at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and our buddy Walter O’Malley.
    “There was no way we [the Dodgers] were going to hire a black player without all four partners agreeing. We knew it would be something like a revolution. You had to have the four partners standing together, standing tall. And they did. Give them credit. Give all of them credit, not just Rickey.
    “Now, we’d been scouting numbers of black players. There was never a plan to integrate the major leagues with more than one, but to find the right one we scouted all over the old colored leagues.
    “I remember the meeting. Lem Jones. Fresco Thompson. A lot of solid baseball people. The scouts agreed that the one best prospect in colored ball was Don Newcombe. Six feet four. Two hundred twenty pounds. A good hitter. Intelligent. And, of course, just an overpowering right-handed pitcher.
    “Rickey went with the scouts. He hadn’t seen any of the prospects personally. Practically speaking, at that time, the president of the Dodgers could not go to a Negro League game himself.
    “He was accepting the scouts’ recommendation until he got to the entry for Newcombe’s age. Newk was only nineteen.