Status Updates From Bottom of the Ninth: Branch...

New York was having enough trouble adjusting to being a one-team town that residents tuned in for “broadcasts“ of Giants games from San Francisco. Ann announcer in a New York studio re-created the action from a teletype.

Branch Rickey, an innovator to the last, was trying to start a third major league in 1960. He was sure there were quality players not under contract in Central and South America. Skeptics, the same ones he had ignored all his life, told him major-league fans would not pay to see those players. 2019 says Branch Rickey was right again.

I didn't realize that Ebbets Field had a tenant when the Dodgers left. Ironically, a Negro League team that struggled on there through 1959, 12 years after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues on that site.

Future mogul Lamar Hunt had been the sort of child who liked to read the attendance figures in the daily box scores.

Excerpt from: "Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself" by Michael Shapiro. Scribd.
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There were 6400 television sets in American homes in 1946 – and 40 million i10 years later.

He style veered toward the rococo; the men he quoted did not speak; they “vehemed” and “exuberated.”

Excerpt from: "Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself" by Michael Shapiro. Scribd.
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Landis ruled by whim and with a certainty in his views that gave the illusion of great intelligence.

Excerpt from: "Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself" by Michael Shapiro. Scribd.
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Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/182563701

It was the rare man who could count among his friends both the mobster Bugsy Siegel and FBI director J. Edgar Hoove

Excerpt from: "Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself" by Michael Shapiro. Scribd.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/182563701

"It is difficult to discern what George Kirksey loved better: baseball or public relations. His memos to Rickey reflected less the sensibility of a wire service reporter than that of an ad man with a product to pitch. In the place of narrative came numbered bullet points, bold and declarative, if rather obvious."

I think the writer and the evangelist, or the writing evangelist, can fall into that sort of thing.

Ban Johnson dreamed baseball almost aloud.

When the average writer of history or sports once to frame a crisis and engage interest, a state or imply this has NEVER happened before. For this author to put a challenge to the Major Leagues in context by going back to when the National League (née Western League) is a professional move.

On the development of Branch Rickey's thinking about a third major league: "His case reflected a mind honed in law school but shaped by a lifetime of Sunday mornings spent first in prayer and then in paying careful attention to his pastors' words. A sermon by way of a legal brief, which is to say that Rickey was as attentive to the fine points as he was to the overarching vision."

Renewed for two worlds.