Branch Rickey

Branch Rickey
by Jimmy Breslin
Penguin, 2011. 146 pgs. Nonfiction.

What better book to read on Opening Day 2011 than Breslin's new bio of Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Dodgers who signed Jackie Robinson and broke the color line for Major League baseball? Opposition to blacks in baseball was so terrible that one team chose to field a one-armed man rather than let a black man play. Branch Rickey changed all that, not, as I always thought, because he knew that Robinson and Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella could take his team to the Series, but because he knew not letting blacks play was not only stupid but wrong. His signing of Robinson was undertaken with beneficence aforethought: he knew it was wrong to exclude anyone from baseball or from anything else, and he set out to change things. How much things have changed between then and now is apparent from the epilogue when voters at the Jackie Robinson elementary school when a Brooklyn election official mimics Jackie's back-and-forth pre-steal moves while overseeing the voters put a black man in the White House. All this sounds very earnest but Breslin is, as always, punchy and acerbic relaying the life of not just a great manager, but a great man.

LW