In the off-season after Robinson’s debut, Mr. Rickey addressed the student football banquet at historically-black Wilberforce University in Ohio. While expressing pride in Jackie’s achievements amidst soaring rhetoric about equality of opportunity for all races, Rickey also engaged in red-baiting. More to the point for SABR, he verbally attacked his fellow team owners, stating that Larry McPhail had led a secret 1946 effort to derail integration, ostensibly for financial reasons. Rickey biographer Lowenfish offers a window into the fascinatingly complex mind of The Mahatma.

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Lee Lowenfish

Lee Lowenfish (eelow627@earthlink.net) has been a SABR member for over 30 years. His Seymour Medal-winning biography Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious Gentleman is now out in paperback from the University of Nebraska Press, which plans to reissue the second edition of his first book, The Imperfect Diamond: A History of Baseball's Labor Wars, in the spring of 2010. He also collaborated with Tom Seaver on The Art of Pitching and with the Major League Baseball Trainers on The Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Fitness Book.