Roughly 1,750 baseball scouting reports by legendary executive Branch Rickey have been digitized by the Library of Congress.
Branch Rickey is best known for signing Jackie Robinson to end segregation in Major League Baseball in 1947. It was an accomplishment well worth the acclaim that Rickey and Robinson received. Rickey brought Robinson to the big leagues when he was president and GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s.
As important as that moment was, it was not the only innovation Branch Rickey brought to baseball. Before his time in Brooklyn, Branch Rickey was the business manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, a position that would eventually be re-named, general manager. In that position, Rickey created the minor league farm system that exists today. By doing so, the Cardinals organization kept the best players and traded or sold other players under their control.
While building his farm system, Branch Rickey was a shrewd evaluator of talent. Many of the players he acquired contributed to the run of success the Cardinals had in the late 1920s and into the 1940s. From 1926 to 1946, the Cardinals won the NL pennant nine times and the World Series six times.
Rickey’s relationship with Cardinals owner Sam Breadon soured in the early 1940s, and he took his talents to Brooklyn, where he became the team’s general manager in 1942. Five years later, Rickey created a spring training complex in Vero Beach, Florida that would become a model facility for other MLB teams. This was just another innovation credited to Branch Rickey during his long career.
Despite being so well known for his time at the helm of the Dodgers, Branch Rickey spent less than a decade with the Dodgers. He was hired in 1942 and pushed out by owner Walter O’Malley in 1950.
He then spent five years with the terrible Pittsburgh Pirates, although he did make a significant contribution to the franchise when he sent his best scout, Howie Haak, to the Caribbean looking for talent. The Pirates improved in the 1960s and 1970s thanks in large part to some of the players scouted in the Caribbean.
Rickey resigned from the GM position for the Pirates after the 1955 season but stayed on as a senior consultant. Seven years later he would return to the Cardinals. It was during his stints with the Pirates from 1951-1956 and the Cardinals in 1962-1963 that he scouted many of the greatest players of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Library of Congress recently digitized roughly 1,750 scouting reports from Rickey’s collection. These reports include information on players such as Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Frank Robinson, and many others.
It’s a treasure trove of scouting information from the mind of a brilliant baseball executive. Of course, not even Branch Rickey is right all the time. There are some reports that look prescient and others in which he made the wrong call. Here is a peek into the scouting reports of some of the most famous players for a generation of baseball fans (and some not so famous).