Branch Rickey and the Beginning of Baseball's Greatest Experiment

Extract

[...] Branch Rickey and the Beginning of Baseball's Greatest Experiment In the beginning, baseball was considered a “gentlemen's with the majority of the leagues containing only white men. Very few black men played in the International League. A man named Cap Anson got blacks banned from major league. He refused to play with any team that had a black man on it. Following the 1887 season, Jim Crow laws were put into place, and it would be almost sixty years before another black man would play professional baseball in the major leagues (Tygiel 10). [...]

[...] Behind the development of this strategy, Rickey was also conjuring up an experiment that would become baseball's greatest experiment (Tyiel 50 51). During this time period of baseball, many managers had reduced their scouting due to the war draft. Rickey did the exact opposite. He increased his scouting efforts four hundred percent. He wanted to sign players who were too young for the draft and train them. He figured by the time the war was over, the players would be fully trained to play. [...]

[...] He sent his talent scouts out to watch the blacks play and take note of potential prospects. By 1945, scouts had been watching black talent for two years. Rickey did such a great job hiding his intentions that even some of the talent scouts thought Rickey was building a Negro team in Brooklyn (Tygiel 51 52). During the extensive talent hunt, a man named Jackie Robinson stood out from all the rest. He would be the one who would eventually help Rickey break the color barrier. [...]