Baseball's Conservative Revolutionary

Branch Rickey was a staunch political conservative who had already transformed baseball before his famous signing of Jackie Robinson. Rickey's biographer talks to Gelf about the great executive's legacy.

Carl Bialik

How does an author chronicle the life of Branch Rickey, the baseball innovator who had already built the St. Louis Cardinals into perennial contenders and invented the modern farm system well before his most-famous act of signing Jackie Robinson to break the sport's color barrier? By not reaching the famous first meeting of Rickey and Robinson until page 373. In Lee Lowenfish's exhaustive new Rickey biography, the former Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers executive emerges as a political and social conservative who had great capacity for innovation in baseball.