RetroSimba

Branch Rickey, who built a baseball legacy by taking risks and defying convention, was true to self in the last major decision of his life.

Faced with the choice of staying in a hospital bed or spending an evening with admirers, Rickey opted to travel from St. Louis to Columbia for his induction into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.

“He preferred to be among the living that night than lying dying in a hospital,” Rickey’s daughter, Mary, told her father’s biographer, Murray Polner.

On Dec. 9, 1965, Rickey, 83, died in a Columbia hospital, 26 days after he collapsed and lost consciousness while delivering an induction speech at a Missouri Sports Hall of Fame banquet.

Farm builder

After serving as manager and executive with the Browns, Rickey moved to the crosstown Cardinals as team president in 1917, beginning a long and successful career with the National League club.

In August 1918, with World War I raging, Rickey joined the U.S. Army chemical corps, was commissioned a major and was assigned to France, where he instructed American soldiers about mustard gas. After the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice, Rickey returned to the Cardinals.

With the franchise experiencing financial hardships, Rickey took on the additional role of manager in order to keep down the payroll.

Realizing the Cardinals needed better players and knowing the club was reluctant to get into bidding wars for prospects, Rickey developed the first farm system, stocking the Cardinals with a steady supply of prime talent.

“In 1919, no one had heard of a farm system _ except Rickey,” The Sporting News wrote. “He devised it as a way for the then impoverished Cardinals to combat richer rivals for talent.”

Said Rickey: “Starting the Cardinals farm system was no sudden stroke of genius. It was a case of necessity being the mother of invention. We lived a precarious existence. Other clubs would outbid us.”

Front-office focus

Rickey was both manager and top baseball executive of the Cardinals from 1919 until May 1925 when team owner Sam Breadon took away the manager role from him and appointed second baseman Rogers Hornsby as player-manager.

Though being ousted as manager “hurt him deeply,” according to biographer Polner, Rickey and the Cardinals excelled when he was focused fulltime on the front office. With Rickey’s administrative leadership and baseball acumen, the Cardinals became a premier franchise, winning six NL pennants and four World Series titles from 1926-42.

“Considering the little money Rickey had to work with in his early years in St. Louis, he was the game’s most successful team builder,” wrote Frederick G. Lieb in The Sporting News.

After the 1942 season, Rickey left the Cardinals to take over as chief baseball executive of the Dodgers. Five years later, he integrated the major leagues by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers and successfully guiding him to a Hall of Fame playing career.

Rickey ended his baseball career in 1964 after an ill-fated two-year stint as a consultant with the Cardinals. He retired and resided in a suburb of St. Louis.

Fateful day

In his book “Branch Rickey: A Biography,” Polner said Rickey suffered a sixth heart attack in November 1965 and was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis.

Rickey spent two weeks in the hospital and was suffering from a high fever, The Sporting News reported. He’d been running a temperature of up to 105 degrees, according to the Associated Press. Nonetheless, Rickey went against his doctor’s orders and family’s wishes and insisted on attending the Nov. 13, 1965, Missouri Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

On the morning of the ceremony, Rickey was driven the 125 miles from St. Louis to Columbia, site of the University of Missouri.

He attended a luncheon and then a football game between Oklahoma and Missouri, The Sporting News reported.

It was a “bleak and cold” afternoon and Rickey watched the game from the stands with his wife, Jane, while “huddled under a blanket, uncomfortable and in apparent distress,” according to Polner.

Afterward, Rickey went to his room at the Mark Twain Hotel and rested. That evening, he and Jane were driven to the Daniel Boone Hotel for the induction banquet. Also being inducted were George Sisler, who had played first base for Rickey at the University of Michigan and with the Browns, and the late J.G. Taylor Spink, formerly publisher of The Sporting News.

Final words

Asked to speak, Rickey talked for about 15 minutes at the dais. He was about to begin an anecdote when he paused and said, “I don’t believe I can continue.”

Those were his last words. He collapsed into a chair and slipped to the floor. A physician rushed to his aid. Rickey was unconscious.

He was carried to a fire department across the street and taken from there by ambulance to Boone County Memorial Hospital, according to Polner.

Rickey remained in a coma until he died at the hospital nearly a month later and 11 days before his 84th birthday.

In the lead to his obituary, the Associated Press called Rickey “a front-office genius who remade baseball over a span of 50 years.”

Wrote The Sporting News: “His achievements as an empire builder who invented the farm system and broke baseball’s color line rank him with the most important figures in the history of the game.”

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(Updated Dec. 20, 2018)

John Mozeliak was mentored by Cardinals royalty. He worked with two of the franchise’s most successful executives, Bing Devine and Walt Jocketty. Because of Devine, Mozeliak can trace a line in his apprenticeship directly to the man who built the prototype of a Cardinals general manager, innovator Branch Rickey.

Mozeliak was Cardinals general manager from October 2007 until he was promoted to president of baseball operations in June 2017. He has followed in the tradition of his best-known predecessors, building championship clubs and keeping the Cardinals among the elite franchises in the big leagues.

Mozeliak is keenly aware of the lineage of Cardinals general managers. He says it is his desire to pay back those who taught him by helping others position themselves to carry on that tradition.

E-mail from Mozeliak

In November 2015, Mozeliak answered questions from Cardinals bloggers by e-mail. The opportunity to ask questions of Mozeliak came about through the efforts of Daniel Shoptaw, founder of United Cardinal Bloggers, and Cardinals communication coordinator Lindsey Weber.

In citing the tradition of prominent figures who have been Cardinals general managers _ men such as Stan Musial, Whitey Herzog, Bob Howsam, Frank Lane, Devine and Jocketty _ I asked Mozeliak whether he ever reflected on that and his role in that legacy.

“I have,” Mozeliak replied. “I have not thought about my legacy, but I have thought a lot about the people that have come before me.”

Jocketty brought Mozeliak to the Cardinals and helped grow his career. Devine provided added value as a sage.

Protégé of Jocketty

Mozeliak, a left-handed pitcher and first baseman in high school at Boulder, Colo., says he grew up a fan of Johnny Bench _ “I tried to be a left-handed catcher, but that didn’t work very well,” he wrote in his e-mail _ as well as George Brett, Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee.

After graduating from the University of Colorado, Mozeliak joined the Rockies as a batting practice pitcher. He worked his way through the organization, earning various roles in baseball operations, and made a favorable impression on Jocketty, the Rockies’ assistant general manager.

Jocketty replaced Dal Maxvill as Cardinals general manager in October 1994. Mozeliak joined the Cardinals after the 1995 season as an assistant in scouting operations.

Mozeliak became Cardinals scouting director in 1999. Jocketty brought Devine back to the Cardinals that fall as a special assignment scout.

Devine intervention

Devine served two stints as Cardinals general manager: 1957-64 and 1968-78. His trades during his first term brought Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Bill White, Julian Javier and Dick Groat to the Cardinals. The farm system under Devine’s management developed players such as Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, Tim McCarver, Mike Shannon and, during his second term, Ted Simmons, Bob Forsch and Keith Hernandez.

In 1939, when he joined the Cardinals as a 23-year-old office assistant, Devine ran errands for Rickey. (Though Rickey formally had the title of Cardinals business manager, his role was that of general manager and included player personnel.)

Sixty years later, when Devine, 83, rejoined the Cardinals as a scout, he bonded with the scouting director, Mozielak, sharing decades of Cardinals knowledge and experience with the 30-year-old protégé.

‘He taught me a lot’

“I had a unique opportunity to work with Bing and did get to know him and actually traveled to some minor-league cities with him,” Mozeliak said in his e-mail. “He taught me a lot. He was someone who had a unique perspective on the business …

“The economics have changed drastically; how you think about development and creating assets within an organization is different, yet there (are) a lot of truisms that you still have to play the game and play the game right,” Mozeliak wrote. “I remember Bing would always reflect on that with me.”

In his 2004 book, “The Memoirs of Bing Devine,” Devine said of his 1999 return to the Cardinals, “I owe a debt of gratitude to the present Cardinals ownership. They believed I was not too old or too far removed to make a contribution from a player evaluation standpoint.”

Devine praised Jocketty as “a talented and aggressive general manager” and, in a nod to executives such as Mozeliak, he added, “The surrounding personnel are dedicated as well.”

In his e-mail, Mozeliak said of Devine, “I think about my opportunity to spend time with him as just very lucky and as I move forward I hope I can someday help the next generation.”

Efficient and effective

Jocketty promoted Mozeliak to the role of Cardinals director of baseball operations in 2001 and then assistant general manager in 2003. After Jocketty departed because of philosophical differences with ownership, Mozeliak succeeded him as general manager in October 2007, 10 months after Devine had died at age 90.

With Mozeliak as general manager, the Cardinals won two National League pennants and a World Series title.

I asked Mozeliak in what ways does he anticipate the role of general manager evolving and how, in 10 to 20 years, it will it be different than how it is today.

“The game has changed in the sense of total revenues … so just understanding this game from a more business perspective is required,” Mozeliak replied in his e-mail. “The demands on the different departments _ whether it’s international, amateur, scouting, or player development _ there are big costs to that, and running efficient and effective departments are critical.

“Most of my time, as boring as it may sound, is not necessarily focused just on the 25-man roster,” Mozeliak wrote. “It’s really making sure that we’re optimizing all those different areas that we touched on. So, I think as general managers’ roles change, it’s more about becoming a more efficient business.”

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